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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2008  with  funding  from 

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http://www.archive.org/details/appetiteoftyrannOOches 


THE  APPETITE  OF 
TYRANNY 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

The  Defendant 

Varied  Types 

Charles  Dickens.  A  Critical  Study 

The  Man  Who  Was  Thursday 

Tremendous  Trifles 

What's  Wrong  with  the  World 

Alarms  and  Discursions 

A  Miscellany  of  Men 

The  Defence  of  Nonsense,  and 
Other  Essays 

Wit  and  Wisdom  of  G.  K.  Chester- 
ton, Selected  and  Arranged 
by  His  Wife 

The  Appetite  of  Tyranny,  In- 
cluding Letters  to  an  Old 
Garibaldian 


THE  APPETITE 
OF  TYRANNY 

Including  Letters  to  an 
Old  Garibaldian 

By 
G.    K.    CHESTERTON 


NEW   YORK 
DODD,    MEAD   AND   COMPANY 

191  5 


Copyright,  1915,  by 
DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 


53 


CONTENTS 

CIIAPTER 

The  Facts  of  the  Case 
I     The  War  on  the  Word 
II     The  Refusal  of  Reciprocity 
III     The  Appetite  of  Tyranny  . 
IV     The  Escape  of  Folly    . 

Letters  to  an  Old  Garibaldlvn 


1 
15 
31 
50 
66 
80 


B55i: 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE 

Unless  we  are  all  mad,  there  is  at  the  back 
of  the  most  bewildering  business  a  story: 
and  if  we  are  all  mad,  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  madness.  If  I  set  a  house  on  fire,  it  is 
quite  true  that  I  may  illuminate  many  other 
people's  weaknesses  as  well  as  my  own.  It 
may  be  that  the  master  of  the  house  was 
burned  because  he  was  drunk;  it  may  be  that 
the  mistress  of  the  house  was  burned  because 
she  was  stingy,  and  perished  arguing  about 
the  expense  of  the  fire-escape.  It  is,  never- 
theless, broadly  true  that  they  both  were 
burned  because  I  set  fire  to  their  house. 
That  is  the  story  of  the  thing.  The  mere 
facts  of  the  story  about  the  present  European 
conflagration  are  quite  as  easy  to  tell. 

Before  we  go  on  to  the  deeper  things  which 
make  this  war  the  most  sincere  war  of  human 


2         THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

history,  it  is  easy  to  answer  the  question  of 
why  England  came  to  be  in  it  at  all,  as  one 
asks  how  a  man  fell  down  a  coal-hole,  or 
failed  to  keep  an  appointment.  Facts  are 
not  the  whole  truth.  But  facts  are  facts, 
and  in  this  case  the  facts  are  few  and  simple. 
Prussia,  France,  and  England  had  all  prom- 
ised not  to  invade  Belgium.  Prussia  pro- 
posed to  invade  Belgium,  because  it  was  the 
safest  way  of  invading  France.  But  Prus- 
sia promised  that  if  she  might  break  in, 
through  her  own  broken  promise  and  ours, 
she  would  break  in  and  not  steal.  In  other 
words,  we  were  offered  at  the  same  instant  a 
promise  of  faith  in  the  future  and  a  proposal 
of  perjury  in  the  present.  Those  interested 
in  human  origin  may  refer  to  an  old  Vic- 
torian writer  of  English,  who,  in  the  last  and 
most  restrained  of  his  historical  essays,  wrote 
of  Frederick  the  Great,  the  founder  of  this 
unchanging  Prussian  policy.     After  describ- 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  3 

ing  how  Frederick  broke  the  guarantee  he  had 
signed  on  behalf  of  Maria  Theresa,  he  then 
describes  how  Frederick  sought  to  put  things 
straight  by  a  promise  that  was  an  insult.  "If 
she  would  but  let  him  have  Silesia,  he  would, 
he  said,  stand  by  her  against  any  power 
which  should  try  to  deprive  her  of  her  other 
dominions,  as  if  he  was  not  already  bound  to 
stand  by  her,  or  as  if  his  new  promise  could 
be  of  more  value  than  the  old  one."  That 
passage  was  written  by  Macaulay,  but  so  far 
as  the  mere  contemporary  facts  are  con- 
cerned, it  might  have  been  written  by  me. 

Upon  the  immediate  logical  and  legal  ori- 
gin of  the  English  interest  there  can  be  no 
rational  debate.  There  are  some  things  so 
simple  that  one  can  almost  prove  them  with 
plans  and  diagrams,  as  in  Euclid.  One 
could  make  a  kind  of  comic  calendar  of  what 
would  have  happened  to  the  English  diplo- 
matist if  he  had  been  silenced  every  time  by 


4         THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Prussian  diplomacy.  Suppose  we  arrange  it 
in  the  form  of  a  kind  of  diary. 

July  24.     Germany  invades  Belgium. 

July  25.     England  declares  war. 

July  26.  Germany  promises  not  to  an- 
nex Belgium. 

July  27.  England  withdraws  from  the 
war. 

July  28.  Germany  annexes  Belgium. 
England  declares  war. 

July  29.  Germany  promises  not  to  an- 
nex France.  England  withdraws  from  the 
war. 

July  30.  Germany  annexes  France. 
England  declares  war. 

July  31.  Germany  promises  not  to  an- 
nex England. 

Aug.  1.  England  withdraws  from  the 
war.     Germany  invades  England  .  .  . 

How  long  is  anybody  expected  to  go  with 
that  sort  of  game,   or  keep  peace   at  that 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  5 

illimitable  price?  How  long  must  we  pur- 
sue a  road  in  which  promises  are  all  fetishes 
in  front  of  us  and  all  fragments  behind  us? 
No :  upon  the  cold  facts  of  the  final  negotia- 
tions, as  told  by  any  of  the  diplomatists 
in  any  of  the  documents,  there  is  no  doubt 
about  the  story.  And  no  doubt  about  the 
villain  of  the  story. 

These  are  the  last  facts — the  facts  which 
involved  England.  It  is  equally  easy  to 
state  the  first  facts — the  facts  which  involved 
Europe.  The  Prince  who  practically  ruled 
Austria  was  shot  by  certain  persons  whom  the 
Austrian  Government  believed  to  be  con- 
spirators from  Servia.  The  Austrian  Gov- 
ernment piled  up  arms  and  armies,  but  said 
not  a  word  either  to  Servia  their  suspect  or 
Italy  their  ally.  From  the  documents  it 
would  seem  that  Austria  kept  everybody  in 
the  dark,  except  Prussia.  It  is  probably 
nearer  the   truth   to  say  that  Prussia  kept 


6         THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

everybody  in  the  dark,  including  Austria. 
But  all  that  is  what  is  called  opinion,  belief, 
conviction  or  common-sense,  and  we  are  not 
dealing  with  it  here.  The  objective  fact  is 
that  Austria  told  Servia  to  permit  Servian 
officers  to  be  suspended  by  the  authority  of 
Austrian  officers,  and  told  Servia  to  submit 
to  this  within  forty-eight  hours.  In  other 
words,  the  sovereign  of  Servia  was  practically 
told  to  take  off  not  only  the  laurels  of  two 
great  campaigns  but  his  own  lawful  and  na- 
tional crown,  and  to  do  it  in  a  time  in  which 
no  respectable  citizen  is  expected  to  discharge 
an  hotel  bill.  Servia  asked  for  time,  for  ar- 
bitration— in  short,  for  peace.  But  Prussia 
had  already  begun  to  mobilise;  and  Prussia, 
presuming  that  Servia  might  thus  be  rescued, 
declared  war. 

Between  these  two  ends  of  fact,  the  ulti- 
matum to  Servia,  the  ultimatum  to  Belgium, 
any  one  so  inclined  can  of  course  talk  as  if 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  7 

everything  were  relative.  If  any  one  ask 
why  the  Czar  should  rush  to  the  support  of 
Servia,  it  is  as  easy  to  ask  why  the  Kaiser 
should  rush  to  the  support  of  Austria.  If 
any  one  say  that  the  French  would  attack  the 
Germans,  it  is  sufficient  to  answer  that  the 
Germans  did  attack  the  French.  There  re- 
main, however,  two  attitudes  to  consider, 
even  perhaps  two  arguments  to  counter, 
which  can  best  be  considered  and  countered 
under  this  general  head  of  facts.  First  of 
all,  there  is  a  curious,  cloudy  sort  of  argu- 
ment, much  affected  by  the  professional  rhet- 
oricians of  Prussia,  who  are  sent  out  to  in- 
struct and  correct  the  minds  of  Americans  or 
Scandinavians.  It  consists  of  going  into 
convulsions  of  incredulity  and  scorn  at  the 
mention  of  Russia's  responsibility  for  Servia 
or  England's  responsibility  for  Belgium;  and 
suggesting  that,  treaty  or  no  treaty,  frontier 
or  no  frontier,  Russia  would  be  out  to  slay 


8         THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Teutons  or  England  to  steal  colonies.  Here, 
as  elsewhere,  I  think  the  professors  dotted  all 
over  the  Baltic  plain  fail  in  lucidity,  and  in 
the  power  of  distinguishing  ideas.  Of  course 
it  is  quite  true  that  England  has  material  in- 
terests to  defend,  and  will  probably  use  the 
opportunity  to  defend  them:  or,  in  other 
words,  of  course  England,  like  everybody 
else,  would  be  more  comfortable  if  Prussia 
were  less  predominant.  The  fact  remains 
that  we  did  not  do  what  the  Germans  did. 
We  did  not  invade  Holland  to  seize  a  naval 
and  commercial  advantage:  and  whether 
they  say  that  we  wished  to  do  it  in  our  greed, 
or  feared  to  do  it  in  our  cowardice,  the  fact 
remains  that  we  did  not  do  it.  Unless  this 
common-sense  principle  be  kept  in  view,  I 
cannot  conceive  how  any  quarrel  can  possibly 
be  judged.  A  contract  may  be  made  be- 
tween two  persons  solely  for  material  advan- 
tage on  each  side :  but  the  moral  advantage  is 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  9 

still  generally  supposed  to  lie  with  the  person 
who  keeps  the  contract.  Surely  it  cannot  be 
dishonest  to  be  honest — even  if  honesty  is 
the  best  policy.  Imagine  the  most  complex 
maze  of  indirect  motives;  and  still  the  man 
who  keeps  faith  for  money  cannot  possibly 
be  worse  than  the  man  who  breaks  faith  for 
money.  It  will  be  noted  that  this  ultimate 
test  applies  in  the  same  way  to  Servia  as  to 
Belgium  and  Britain.  The  Servians  may  not 
be  a  very  peaceful  people;  but,  on  the  oc- 
casion under  discussion,  it  was  certainly  they 
who  wanted  peace.  You  may  choose  to 
think  the  Serb  a  sort  of  born  robber:  but  on 
this  occasion  it  was  certainly  the  Austrian 
who  was  trying  to  rob.  Similarly,  you  may 
call  England  perfidious  as  a  sort  of  historical 
summary;  and  declare  your  private  belief 
that  Mr.  Asquith  was  vowed  from  infancy  to 
the  ruin  of  the  German  Empire,  a  Hannibal 
and  hater  of  the  eagles.     But,  when  all  is 


io       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

said,  it  is  nonsense  to  call  a  man  perfidious 
because  he  keeps  his  promise.  It  is  absurd 
to  complain  of  the  sudden  treachery  of  a 
business  man  in  turning  up  punctually  to 
his  appointment:  or  the  unfair  shock  given 
to  a  creditor  by  the  debtor  paying  his  debts. 
Lastly,  there  is  an  attitude  not  unknown 
in  the  crisis  against  which  I  should  particu- 
larly like  to  protest.  I  should  address  my 
protest  especially  to  those  lovers  and  pur- 
suers of  Peace  who,  very  short-sightedly, 
have  occasionally  adopted  it.  I  mean  the 
attitude  which  is  impatient  of  these  prelimi- 
nary details  about  who  did  this  or  that,  and 
whether  it  was  right  or  wrong.  They  are 
satisfied  with  saying  that  an  enormous  calam- 
ity, called  War,  has  been  begun  by  some  or 
all  of  us;  and  should  be  ended  by  some  or  all 
of  us.  To  these  people  this  preliminary 
chapter  about  the  precise  happenings  must 
appear  not  only  dry  (and  it  must  of  neces- 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  n 

sity  be  the  driest  part  of  the  task)  but  essen- 
tially needless  and  barren.  I  wish  to  tell 
these  people  that  they  are  wrong;  that  they 
are  wrong  upon  all  principles  of  human  jus- 
tice and  historic  continuity:  but  that  they 
are  specially  and  supremely  wrong  upon  their 
own  principles  of  arbitration  and  interna- 
tional peace. 

These  sincere  and  high-minded  peace-lov- 
ers are  always  telling  us  that  citizens  no 
longer  settle  their  quarrels  by  private  vio- 
lence ;  and  that  nations  should  no  longer  set- 
tle theirs  by  public  violence.  They  are  al- 
ways telling  us  that  we  no  longer  fight  duels; 
and  need  no  longer  wage  wars.  In  short, 
they  perpetually  base  their  peace  proposals 
on  the  fact  that  an  ordinary  citizen  no  longer 
avenges  himself  with  an  axe.  But  how  is 
he  prevented  from  revenging  himself  with  an 
axe*?  If  he  hits  his  neighbour  on  the  head 
with  the  kitchen  chopper,  what  do  we  do4? 


12       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Do  we  all  join  hands,  like  children  playing 
Mulberry  Bush,  and  say  "We  are  all  respon- 
sible for  this;  but  let  us  hope  it  will  not 
spread.  Let  us  hope  for  the  happy  day 
when  he  shall  leave  off  chopping  at  the  man's 
head;  and  when  nobody  shall  ever  chop  any- 
thing for  ever  and  ever."  Do  we  say  "Let 
byegones  be  byegones;  why  go  back  to  all 
the  dull  details  with  which  the  business  be- 
gan; who  can  tell  with  what  sinister  motives 
the  man  was  standing  there  within  reach  of 
the  hatchet?"  We  do  not.  We  keep  the 
peace  in  private  life  by  asking  for  the  facts 
of  provocation,  and  the  proper  object  of  pun- 
ishment. We  do  go  into  the  dull  details; 
we  do  enquire  into  the  origins;  we  do  em- 
phatically enquire  who  it  was  that  hit  first. 
In  short  we  do  what  I  have  done  very  briefly 
in  this  place. 

Given  this,  it  is  indeed  true  that  behind 
these  facts  there  are  truths:  truths  of  a  ter- 


THE  FACTS  OF  THE  CASE  13 

rible,  of  a  spiritual  sort.  In  mere  fact,  the 
Germanic  power  has  been  wrong  about  Ser- 
via,  wrong  about  Russia,  wrong  about  Bel- 
gium, wrong  about  England,  wrong  about 
Italy.  But  there  was  a  reason  for  its  being 
wrong  everywhere;  and  of  that  root  reason, 
which  has  moved  half  the  world  against  it, 
I  shall  speak  later.  For  that  is  something 
too  omnipresent  to  be  proved,  too  indispu- 
table to  be  helped  by  detail.  It  is  nothing 
less  than  the  locating,  after  more  than  a  hun- 
dred years  of  recriminations  and  wrong  ex- 
planations, of  the  modern  European  evil :  the 
finding  of  the  fountain  from  which  poison 
has  flowed  upon  all  the  nations  of  the  earth. 


I 

THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD 

It  will  hardly  be  denied  that  there  is  one 
lingering  doubt  in  many,  who  recognise  un- 
avoidable self-defence  in  the  instant  parry  of 
the  English  sword,  and  who  have  no  great 
love  for  the  sweeping  sabre  of  Sadowa  and 
Sedan.  That  doubt  is  the  doubt  whether 
Russia,  as  compared  with  Prussia,  is  suffi- 
ciently decent  and  democratic  to  be  the  ally 
of  liberal  and  civilised  powers.  I  take  first, 
therefore,  this  matter  of  civilisation. 

It  is  vital  in  a  discussion  like  this,  that  we 
should  make  sure  we  are  going  by  meanings 
and  not  by  mere  words.  It  is  not  necessary 
in  any  argument  to  settle  what  a  word  means 
or  ought  to  mean.  But  it  is  necessary  in 
every  argument  to  settle  what  we  propose  to 
mean  by  the  word.  So  long  as  our  opponent 
understands  what  is  the  thing  of  which  we 
15 


16       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

arc  talking,  it  does  not  matter  to  the  argu- 
ment whether  the  word  is  or  is  not  the  one  he 
would  have  chosen.  A  soldier  does  not  say 
"We  were  ordered  to  go  to  Mechlin;  but  I 
would  rather  go  to  Malines."  He  may  dis- 
cuss the  etymology  and  archceology  of  the 
difference  on  the  march;  but  the  point  is 
that  he  knows  where  to  go.  So  long  as  we 
know  what  a  given  word  is  to  mean  in  a 
given  discussion,  it  does  not  even  matter  if  it 
means  something  else  in  some  other  and  quite 
distinct  discussion.  We  have  a  perfect  right 
to  say  that  the  width  of  a  window  comes  to 
four  feet;  even  if  we  instantly  and  cheerfully 
change  the  subject  to  the  larger  mammals; 
and  say  that  an  elephant  has  four  feet.  The 
identity  of  the  words  does  not  matter,  be- 
cause there  is  no  doubt  at  all  about  the  mean- 
ings ;  because  nobody  is  likely  to  think  of  an 
elephant  as  four  foot  long,  or  of  a  window  as 
having  tusks  and  a  curly  trunk. 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  17 

It  is  essential*  to  emphasise  this  conscious- 
ness of  the  thing  under  discussion  in  connec- 
tion with  two  or  three  words  that  are,  as 
it  were,  the  key- words  of  this  war.  One  of 
them  is  the  word  "barbarian."  The  Prus- 
sians apply  it  to  the  Russians:  the  Russians 
apply  it  to  the  Prussians.  Both,  I  think, 
really  mean  something  that  really  exists, 
name  or  no  name.  Both  mean  different 
things.  And  if  we  ask  what  these  different 
things  are,  we  shall  understand  why  Eng- 
land and  France  prefer  Russia;  and  consider 
Prussia  the  really  dangerous  barbarian  of  the 
two.  To  begin  with,  it  goes  so  much  deeper 
even  than  atrocities;  of  which,  in  the  past 
at  least,  all  the  three  Empires  of  Central 
Europe  have  partaken  pretty  equally,  as  they 
partook  of  Poland.  An  English  writer,  seek- 
ing to  avert  the  war  by  warnings  against 
Russian  influence,  said  that  the  flogged  backs 
of  Polish  women  stood  between  us  and  the 


i8       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Alliance.  But  not  long  before,  the  flogging 
of  women  by  an  Austrian  general  led  to  that 
officer  being  thrashed  in  the  streets  of  Lon- 
don by  Barclay  and  Perkins'  draymen. 
And  as  for  the  third  power,  the  Prussians, 
it  seems  clear  that  they  have  treated  Belgian 
women  in  a  style  compared  with  which  flog- 
ging might  be  called  an  official  formality. 
But,  as  I  say,  something  much  deeper  than 
any  such  recrimination  lies  behind  the  use 
of  the  word  on  either  side.  When  the  Ger- 
man Emperor  complains  of  our  allying  our- 
selves with  a  barbaric  and  half-oriental 
power  he  is  not  (I  assure  you)  shedding 
tears  over  the  grave  of  Kosciusko.  And 
when  I  say  (as  I  do  most  heartily)  that  the 
German  Emperor  is  a  barbarian,  I  am  not 
merely  expressing  any  prejudices  I  may  have 
against  the  profanation  of  churches  or  of 
children.  My  countrymen  and  I  mean  a 
certain  and  intelligible  thing  when  we  call 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  19 

the  Prussians  barbarians.  It  is  quite  differ- 
ent from  the  thing  attributed  to  Russians; 
and  it  could  not  possibly  be  attributed  to 
Russians.  It  is  very  important  that  the 
neutral  world  should  understand  what  this 
thing  is. 

If  the  German  calls  the  Russian  barbarous 
he  presumably  means  imperfectly  civilised. 
There  is  a  certain  path  along  which  Western 
nations  have  proceeded  in  recent  times;  and 
it  is  tenable  that  Russia  has  not  proceeded  so 
far  as  the  others:  that  she  has  less  of  the 
special  modern  system  in  science,  commerce, 
machinery,  travel  or  political  constitution. 
The  Russ  ploughs  with  an  old  plough;  he 
wears  a  wild  beard;  he  adores  relics;  his  life 
is  as  rude  and  hard  as  that  of  a  subject  of 
Alfred  the  Great.  Therefore  he  is,  in  the 
German  sense,  a  barbarian.  Poor  fellows 
like  Gorky  and  Dostoieffsky  have  to  form 
their  own  reflections  on  the  scenery,  without 


20       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

the  assistance  of  large  quotations  from  Schil- 
ler on  garden  seats;  or  inscriptions  directing 
them  to  pause  and  thank  the  All-Father  for 
the  finest  view  in  Hesse-Pumpernickel.  The 
Russians,  having  nothing  but  their  faith, 
their  fields,  their  great  courage,  and  their 
self-governing  communes,  are  quite  cut  off 
from  what  is  called  (in  the  fashionable  street 
in  Frankfort)  The  True,  The  Beautiful  and 
The  Good.  There  is  a  real  sense  in  which 
one  can  call  such  backwardness  barbaric;  by- 
comparison  with  the  Kaiserstrasse;  and  in 
that  sense  it  is  true  of  Russia. 

Now  we,  the  French  and  English,  do  not 
mean  this  when  we  call  the  Prussians  bar- 
barians. If  their  cities  soared  higher  than 
their  flying  ships,  if  their  trains  travelled 
faster  than  their  bullets,  we  should  still  call 
them  barbarians.  We  should  know  exactly 
what  we  meant  by  it;  and  we  should  know 
that  it  is  true.     For  we  do  not  mean  any- 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  21 

thing  that  is  an  imperfect  civilisation  by  ac- 
cident. We  mean  something  that  is  the 
enemy  of  civilisation  by  design.  We  mean 
something  that  is  wilfully  at  war  with  the 
principles  by  which  human  society  has  been 
made  possible  hitherto.  Of  course  it  must 
be  partly  civilised  even  to  destroy  civilisa- 
tion. Such  ruin  could  not  be  wrought  by 
the  savages  that  are  merely  undeveloped  or 
inert.  You  could  not  have  even  Huns  with- 
out horses;  or  horses  without  horsemanship. 
You  could  not  have  even  Danish  pirates  with- 
out ships,  or  ships  without  seamanship. 
This  person,  whom  I  may  call  the  Positive 
Barbarian,  must  be  rather  more  superficially 
up-to-date  than  what  I  may  call  the  Nega- 
tive Barbarian.  Alaric  was  an  officer  in  the 
Roman  legions :  but  for  all  that  he  destroyed 
Rome.  Nobody  supposes  that  Eskimos 
could  have  done  it  at  all  neatly.  But  (in 
our  meaning)  barbarism  is  not  a  matter  of 


22       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

methods  but  of  aims.  We  say  that  these 
veneered  vandals  have  the  perfectly  serious 
aim  of  destroying  certain  ideas  which,  as 
they  think,  the  world  has  outgrown ;  without 
which,  as  we  think,  the  world  will  die. 

It  is  essential  that  this  perilous  peculiarity 
in  the  Pruss,  or  Positive  Barbarian,  should  be 
seized.  He  has  what  he  fancies  is  a  new 
idea;  and  he  is  going  to  apply  it  to  every- 
body. As  a  fact  it  is  simply  a  false  general- 
isation; but  he  is  really  trying  to  make  it 
general.  This  does  not  apply  to  the  Nega- 
tive Barbarian :  it  does  not  apply  to  the  Rus- 
sian or  the  Servian,  even  if  they  are  bar- 
barians. If  a  Russian  peasant  does  beat  his 
wife,  he  does  it  because  his  fathers  did  it 
before  him:  he  is  likely  to  beat  less  rather 
than  more  as  the  past  fades  away.  He  does 
not  think,  as  the  Prussian  would,  that  he  has 
made  a  new  discovery  in  physiology  in  find- 
ing that  a  woman  is  weaker  than  a  man. 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  23 

If  a  Servian  does  knife  his  rival  without  a 
word,  he  does  it  because  other  Servians  have 
done  it.  He  may  regard  it  even  as  piety,  but 
certainly  not  as  progress.  He  does  not 
think,  as  the  Prussian  does,  that  he  founds 
a  new  school  of  horology  by  starting  be- 
fore the  word  "Go."  He  does  not  think  he 
is  in  advance  of  the  world  in  militarism, 
merely  because  he  is  behind  it  in  morals. 
No;  the  danger  of  the  Pruss  is  that  he  is 
prepared  to  fight  for  old  errors  as  if  they  were 
new  truths.  He  has  somehow  heard  of  cer- 
tain shallow  simplifications;  and  imagines 
that  we  have  never  heard  of  them.  And, 
as  I  have  said,  his  limited  but  very  sincere 
lunacy  concentrates  chiefly  in  a  desire  to  de- 
stroy two  ideas,  the  twin  root  ideas  of  ra- 
tional society.  The  first  is  the  idea  of  record 
and  promise:  the  second  is  the  idea  of  reci- 
procity. 

It  is  plain  that  the  promise,  or  extension 


24       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

of  responsibility  through  time,  is  what  chiefly 
distinguishes  us,  I  will  not  say  from  savages, 
but  from  brutes  and  reptiles.  This  was 
noted  by  the  shrewdness  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, when  it  summed  up  the  dark  irrespon- 
sible enormity  of  Leviathan  in  the  words 
"Will  he  make  a  pact  with  thee*?"  The 
promise,  like  the  wheel,  is  unknown  in  Na- 
ture: and  is  the  first  mark  of  man.  Refer- 
ring only  to  human  civilisation  it  may  be 
said  with  seriousness,  that  in  the  beginning 
was  the  Word.  The  vow  is  to  the  man  what 
the  song  is  to  the  bird,  or  the  bark  to  the 
dog;  his  voice,  whereby  he  is  known.  Just 
as  a  man  who  cannot  keep  an  appointment 
is  not  fit  even  to  fight  a  duel,  so  the  man  who 
cannot  keep  an  appointment  with  himself  is 
not  sane  enough  even  for  suicide.  It  is  not 
easy  to  mention  anything  on  which  the  enor- 
mous apparatus  of  human  life  can  be  said 
to  depend.     But  if  it  depends  on  anything, 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  25 

it  is  on  this  frail  cord,  flung  from  the  for- 
gotten hills  of  yesterday  to  the  invisible 
mountains  of  to-morrow.  On  that  solitary 
string  hangs  everything  from  Armageddon  to 
an  almanac,  from  a  successful  revolution  to 
a  return  ticket.  On  that  solitary  string  the 
Barbarian  is  hacking  heavily,  with  a  sabre 
which  is  fortunately  blunt. 

Any  one  can  see  this  well  enough,  merely 
by  reading  the  last  negotiations  between 
London  and  Berlin.  The  Prussians  had 
made  a  new  discovery  in  international  poli- 
tics :  that  it  may  often  be  convenient  to  make 
a  promise;  and  yet  curiously  inconvenient  to 
keep  it.  They  were  charmed,  in  their  simple 
way,  with  this  scientific  discovery,  and  de- 
sired to  communicate  it  to  the  world.  They 
therefore  promised  England  a  promise,  on 
condition  that  she  broke  a  promise,  and  on 
the  implied  condition  that  the  new  promise 
might  be  broken  as  easily  as  the  old  one.    To 


26       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

the  profound  astonishment  of  Prussia,  this 
reasonable  offer  was  refused !  I  believe  that 
the  astonishment  of  Prussia  was  quite  sin- 
cere. That  is  what  I  mean  when  I  say  that 
the  Barbarian  is  trying  to  cut  away  that  cord 
of  honesty  and  clear  record,  on  which  hangs 
all  that  men  have  made. 

The  friends  of  the  German  cause  have 
complained  that  Asiatics  and  Africans  upon 
the  very  verge  of  savagery  have  been  brought 
against  them  from  India  and  Algiers.  And, 
in  ordinary  circumstances,  I  should  sympa- 
thise with  such  a  complaint  made  by  a 
European  people.  But  the  circumstances  are 
not  ordinary.  Here,  again,  the  quite  unique 
barbarism  of  Prussia  goes  deeper  than  what 
we  call  barbarities.  About  mere  barbarities, 
it  is  true,  the  Turco  and  the  Sikh  would  have 
a  very  good  reply  to  the  superior  Teuton. 
The  general  and  just  reason  for  not  using 
non-European   tribes   against   Europeans    is 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  27 

that  given  by  Chatham  against  the  use  of 
the  Red  Indian:  that  such  allies  might  do 
very  diabolical  things.  But  the  poor  Turco 
might  not  unreasonably  ask,  after  a  week- 
end in  Belgium,  what  more  diabolical  things 
he  could  do  than  the  highly  cultured  Ger- 
mans were  doing  themselves.  Nevertheless, 
as  I  say,  the  justification  of  any  extra-Eu- 
ropean aid  goes  deeper  than  any  such  details. 
It  rests  upon  the  fact  that  even  other  civilisa- 
tions, even  much  lower  civilisations,  even  re- 
mote and  repulsive  civilisations,  depend  as 
much  as  our  own  on  this  primary  principle 
on  which  the  super-morality  of  Potsdam  de- 
clares open  War.  Even  savages  promise 
things;  and  respect  those  who  keep  their 
promises.  Even  Orientals  write  things 
down :  and  though  they  write  them  from  right 
to  left,  they  know  the  importance  of  a  scrap 
of  paper.  Many  merchants  will  tell  you 
that  the  word  of  the  sinister  and  almost  un- 


28       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

human  Chinaman  is  often  as  good  as  his 
bond :  and  it  was  amid  palm  trees  and  Syrian 
pavilions  that  the  great  utterance  opened  the 
tabernacle,  to  him  that  sweareth  to  his  hurt 
and  changeth  not.  There  is  doubtless  a 
dense  labyrinth  of  duplicity  in  the  East,  and 
perhaps  more  guile  in  the  individual  Asiatic 
than  in  the  individual  German.  But  we  are 
not  talking  of  the  violations  of  human  mo- 
rality in  various  parts  of  the  world.  We  are 
talking  about  a  new  and  inhuman  morality, 
which  denies  altogether  the  day  of  obligation. 
The  Prussians  have  been  told  by  their  liter- 
ary men  that  everything  depends  upon 
Mood:  and  by  their  politicians  that  all  ar- 
rangements dissolve  before  "necessity." 
That  is  the  importance  of  the  German  Chan- 
cellor's phrase.  He  did  not  allege  some 
special  excuse  in  the  case  of  Belgium,  which 
might  make  it  seem  an  exception  that  proved 
the  rule.     He  distinctly  argued,  as  on  a  prin- 


THE  WAR  ON  THE  WORD  29 

ciple  applicable  to  other  cases,  that  victory 
was  a  necessity  and  honour  was  a  scrap  of 
paper.  And  it  is  evident  that  the  half-edu- 
cated Prussian  imagination  really  cannot  get 
any  further  than  this.  It  cannot  see  that  if 
everybody's  action  were  entirely  incalculable 
from  hour  to  hour,  it  would  not  only  be  the 
end  of  all  promises,  but  the  end  of  all  proj- 
ects. In  not  being  able  to  see  that,  the  Ber- 
lin philosopher  is  really  on  a  lower  mental 
level  than  the  Arab  who  respects  the  salt,  or 
the  Brahmin  who  preserves  the  caste.  And 
in  this  quarrel  we  have  a  right  to  come  with 
scimitars  as  well  as  sabres,  with  bows  as  well 
as  rifles,  with  assegai  and  tomahawk  and 
boomerang,  because  there  is  in  all  these  at 
least  a  seed  of  civilisation  that  these  intel- 
lectual anarchists  would  kill.  And  if  they 
should  find  us  in  our  last  stand  girt  with  such 
strange  swords  and  following  unfamiliar  en- 
signs, and  ask  us  for  what  we  fight  in  so 


3o       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

singular  a  company,  we  shall  know  what  to 
reply:  "We  fight  for  the  trust  and  for  the 
tryst;  for  fixed  memories  and  the  possible 
meeting  of  men ;  for  all  that  makes  life  any- 
thing but  an  uncontrollable  nightmare.  We 
fight  for  the  long  arm  of  honour  and  remem- 
brance ;  for  all  that  can  lift  a  man  above  the 
quicksands  of  his  moods,  and  give  him  the 
mastery  of  time." 


II 

THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY 

In  the  last  summary  I  suggested  that  Bar- 
barism, as  we  mean  it,  is  not  mere  ignorance 
or  even  mere  cruelty.  It  has  a  more  precise 
sense,  and  means  militant  hostility  to  certain 
necessary  human  ideas.  I  took  the  case  of 
the  vow  or  the  contract,  which  Prussian  in- 
tellectualism  would  destroy.  I  urged  that 
the  Prussian  is  a  spiritual  Barbarian,  because 
he  is  not  bound  by  his  own  past,  any  more 
than  a  man  in  a  dream.  He  avows  that 
when  he  promised  to  respect  a  frontier  on 
Monday,  he  did  not  foresee  what  he  calls 
"the  necessity"  of  not  respecting  it  on  Tues- 
day. In  short,  he  is  like  a  child,  who  at  the 
end  of  all  reasonable  explanations  and  re- 
minders of  admitted  arrangements,  has  no 
answer  except  "But  I  want  to." 
31 


32       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

There  is  another  idea  in  human  arrange- 
ments so  fundamental  as  to  be  forgotten ;  but 
now  for  the  first  time  denied.  It  may  be 
called  the  idea  of  reciprocity;  or,  in  better 
English,  of  give  and  take.  The  Prussian 
appears  to  be  quite  intellectually  incapable 
of  this  thought.  He  cannot,  I  think,  con- 
ceive the  idea  that  is  the  foundation  of  all 
comedy;  that,  in  the  eyes  of  the  other  man, 
he  is  only  the  other  man.  And  if  we  carry 
this  clue  through  the  institutions  of  Prussian- 
ised Germany,  we  shall  find  how  curiously 
his  mind  has  been  limited  in  the  matter. 
The  German  differs  from  other  patriots  in 
the  inability  to  understand  patriotism.  Other 
European  peoples  pity  the  Poles  or  the  Welsh 
for  their  violated  borders;  but  Germans  pity 
only  themselves.  They  might  take  forcible 
possession  of  the  Severn  or  the  Danube,  of 
the  Thames  or  the  Tiber,  of  the  Garry  or  the 
Garonne — and  they  would  still  be  singing 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       33 

sadly  about  how  fast  and  true  stands  the 
watch  on  Rhine ;  and  what  a  shame  it  would 
be  if  any  one  took  their  own  little  river  away 
from  them.  That  is  what  I  mean  by  not  be- 
ing reciprocal :  and  you  will  find  it  in  all 
that  they  do:  as  in  all  that  is  done  by  sav- 
ages. 

Here,  again,  it  is  very  necessary  to  avoid 
confusing  this  soul  of  the  savage  with  mere 
savagery  in  the  sense  of  brutality  or  butch- 
ery; in  which  the  Greeks,  the  French  and  all 
the  most  civilised  nations  have  indulged  in 
hours  of  abnormal  panic  or  revenge.  Ac- 
cusations of  cruelty  are  generally  mutual. 
But  it  is  the  point  about  the  Prussian  that 
with  him  nothing  is  mutual.  The  defini- 
tion of  the  true  savage  does  not  concern  it- 
self even  with  how  much  more  he  hurts 
strangers  or  captives  than  do  the  other  tribes 
of  men.  The  definition  of  the  true  savage  is 
that  he  laughs  when  he  hurts  you ;  and  howls 


34       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

when  you  hurt  him.  This  extraordinary  in- 
equality in  the  mind  is  in  every  act  and  word 
that  comes  from  Berlin.  For  instance,  no 
man  of  the  world  believes  all  he  sees  in  the 
newspapers;  and  no  journalist  believes  a 
quarter  of  it.  We  should,  therefore,  be 
quite  ready  in  the  ordinary  way  to  take  a 
great  deal  off  the  tales  of  German  atrocities; 
to  doubt  this  story  or  deny  that.  But  there 
is  one  thing  that  we  cannot  doubt  or  deny: 
the  seal  and  authority  of  the  Emperor.  In 
the  Imperial  proclamation  the  fact  that  cer- 
tain "frightful"  things  have  been  done  is 
admitted;  and  justified  on  the  ground  of 
their  frightfulness.  It  was  a  military  ne- 
cessity to  terrify  the  peaceful  populations 
with  something  that  was  not  civilised,  some- 
thing that  was  hardly  human.  Very  well. 
That  is  an  intelligible  policy:  and  in  that 
sense  an  intelligible  argument.  An  army  en- 
dangered by   foreigners   may  do   the   most 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       35 

frightful  things.  But  then  we  turn  the  next 
page  of  the  Kaiser's  public  diary,  and  we 
find  him  writing  to  the  President  of  the 
United  States,  to  complain  that  the  English 
are  using  Dum-dum  bullets  and  violating 
various  regulations  of  the  Hague  Conference. 
I  pass  for  the  present  the  question  of  whether 
there  is  a  word  of  truth  in  these  charges.  I 
am  content  to  gaze  rapturously  at  the  blink- 
ing eyes  of  the  True,  or  Positive,  Barbarian. 
I  suppose  he  would  be  quite  puzzled  if  we 
said  that  violating  the  Hague  Conference 
was  "a  military  necessity"  to  us;  or  that  the 
rules  of  the  Conference  were  only  a  scrap  of 
paper.  He  would  be  quite  pained  if  we  said 
that  Dum-dum  bullets,  "by  their  very  fright- 
fulness,"  would  be  very  useful  to  keep  con- 
quered Germans  in  order.  Do  what  he  will, 
he  cannot  get  outside  the  idea  that  he,  be- 
cause he  is  he  and  not  you,  is  free  to  break 
the  law;  and  also  to  appeal  to  the  law.     It 


36       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

is  said  that  the  Prussian  officers  play  at  a 
game  called  Kriegsspiel,  or  the  War  Game. 
But  in  truth  they  could  not  play  at  any  game ; 
for  the  essence  of  every  game  is  that  the  rules 
are  the  same  on  both  sides. 

But  taking  every  German  institution  in 
turn,  the  case  is  the  same;  and  it  is  not  a 
case  of  mere  bloodshed  or  military  bravado. 
The  duel,  for  example,  can  legitimately  be 
called  a  barbaric  thing;  but  the  word  is  here 
used  in  another  sense.  There  are  duels  in 
Germany;  but  so  there  are  in  France,  Italy, 
Belgium,  and  Spain;  indeed,  there  are  duels 
wherever  there  are  dentists,  newspapers, 
Turkish  baths,  time-tables,  and  all  the  curses 
of  civilisation;  except  in  England  and  a  cor- 
ner of  America.  You  may  happen  to  regard 
the  duel  as  a  historic  relic  of  the  more  bar- 
baric States  on  which  these  modern  States 
were  built.  It  might  equally  well  be  main- 
tained that  the  duel  is  everywhere  the  sign 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       37 

of  high  civilisation;  being  the  sign  of  its  more 
delicate  sense  of  honour,  its  more  vulnerable 
vanity,  or  its  greater  dread  of  social  dis- 
repute. But  whichever  of  the  two  views 
you  take,  you  must  concede  that  the  essence 
of  the  duel  is  an  armed  equality.  I  should 
not,  therefore,  apply  the  word  barbaric,  as 
I  am  using  it,  to  the  duels  of  German  officers, 
or  even  to  the  broadsword  combats  that  are 
conventional  among  the  German  students.  I 
do  not  see  why  a  young  Prussian  should  not 
have  scars  all  over  his  face  if  he  likes  them; 
nay,  they  are  often  the  redeeming  points  of 
interest  on  an  otherwise  somewhat  unenlight- 
ening  countenance.  The  duel  may  be  de- 
fended; the  sham  duel  may  be  defended. 

What  cannot  be  defended  is  something 
really  peculiar  to  Prussia,  of  which  we  hear 
numberless  stories,  some  of  them  certainly 
true.  It  might  be  called  the  one-sided  duel. 
I  mean  the  idea  that  there  is  some  sort  of  dig- 


38       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

nity  in  drawing  the  sword  upon  a  man  who 
has  not  got  a  sword;  a  waiter,  or  a  shop  as- 
sistant, or  even  a  schoolboy.  One  of  the 
officers  of  the  Kaiser  in  the  affair  at  Sa- 
berne  was  found  industriously  hacking  at  a 
cripple.  In  all  these  matters  I  would  avoid 
sentiment.  We  must  not  lose  our  tempers 
at  the  mere  cruelty  of  the  thing;  but  pursue 
the  strict  psychological  distinction.  Others 
besides  German  soldiers  have  slain  the  de- 
fenceless, for  loot  or  lust  or  private  malice, 
like  any  other  murderer.  The  point  is  that 
nowhere  else  but  in  Prussian  Germany  is  any 
theory  of  honour  mixed  up  with  such  things ; 
any  more  than  with  poisoning  or  picking 
pockets.  No  French,  English,  Italian  or 
American  gentleman  would  think  he  had  in 
some  way  cleared  his  own  character  by  stick- 
ing his  sabre  through  some  ridiculous  green- 
grocer who  had  nothing  in  his  hand  but  a 
cucumber.     It  would  seem  as  if  the  word 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       39 

which  is  translated  from  the  German  as 
"honour"  must  really  mean  something  quite 
different  in  German.  It  seems  to  mean 
something  more  like  what  we  should  call 
"prestige." 

The  fundamental  fact,  however,  is  the  ab- 
sence of  the  reciprocal  idea.  The  Prussian 
is  not  sufficiently  civilised  for  the  duel. 
Even  when  he  crosses  swords  with  us  his 
thoughts  are  not  as  our  thoughts;  when  we 
both  glorify  war,  we  are  glorifying  different 
things.  Our  medals  are  wrought  like  his, 
but  they  do  not  mean  the  same  thing;  our 
regiments  are  cheered  as  his  are,  but  the 
thought  in  the  heart  is  not  the  same;  the 
Iron  Cross  is  on  the  bosom  of  his  king,  but 
it  is  not  the  sign  of  our  God.  For  we,  alas, 
follow  our  God  with  many  relapses  and  self- 
contradictions,  but  he  follows  his  very  con- 
sistently. Through  all  the  things  that  we 
have  examined,  the  view  of  national  bound- 


40       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

aries,  the  view  of  military  methods,  the 
view  of  personal  honour  and  self-defence, 
there  runs  in  their  case  something  of  an 
atrocious  simplicity;  something  too  simple 
for  us  to  understand:  the  idea  that  glory 
consists  in  holding  the  steel,  and  not  in  fac- 
ing it. 

If  further  examples  were  necessary,  it 
would  be  easy  to  give  hundreds  of  them. 
Let  us  leave,  for  the  moment,  the  relation 
between  man  and  man  in  the  thing  called 
the  duel.  Let  us  take  the  relation  between 
man  and  woman,  in  that  immortal  duel 
which  we  call  a  marriage.  Here  again  we 
shall  find  that  other  Christian  civilisations 
aim  at  some  kind  of  equality;  even  if  the 
balance  be  irrational  or  dangerous.  Thus, 
the  two  extremes  of  the  treatment  of  women 
might  be  represented  by  what  are  called  the 
respectable  classes  in  America  and  in  France. 
In  America  they  choose  the  risk  of  comrade- 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       41 

ship;  in  France  the  compensation  of  courtesy. 
In  America  it  is  practically  possible  for  any 
young  gentleman  to  take  any  young  lady  for 
what  he  calls  (  I  deeply  regret  to  say)  a  joy- 
ride;  but  at  least  the  man  goes  with  the 
woman  as  much  as  the  woman  with  the  man. 
In  France  the  young  woman  is  protected  like 
a  nun  while  she  is  unmarried;  but  when  she 
is  a  mother  she  is  really  a  holy  woman;  and 
when  she  is  a  grandmother  she  is  a  holy  ter- 
ror. By  both  extremes  the  woman  gets 
something  back  out  of  life.  There  is  only 
one  place  where  she  gets  little  or  nothing 
back;  and  that  is  the  north  of  Germany. 
France  and  America  aim  alike  at  equality; 
America  by  similarity;  France  by  dissimilar- 
ity. But  North  Germany  does  definitely 
aim  at  inequality.  The  woman  stands  up, 
with  no  more  irritation  than  a  butler;  the 
man  sits  down,  with  no  more  embarrassment 
than  a  guest.     This  is  the  cool  affirmation 


42       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

of  inferiority,  as  in  the  case  of  the  sabre  and 
the  tradesman.  "Thou  goest  with  women; 
forget  not  thy  whip,"  said  Nietzsche.  It 
will  be  observed  that  he  does  not  say 
"poker";  which  might  come  more  naturally 
to  the  mind  of  a  more  common  or  Christian 
wife-beater.  But  then  a  poker  is  a  part  of 
domesticity;  and  might  be  used  by  the  wife 
as  well  as  the  husband.  In  fact,  it  often  is. 
The  sword  and  the  whip  are  the  weapons 
of  a  privileged  caste. 

Pass  from  the  closest  of  all  differences, 
that  between  husband  and  wife,  to  the  most 
distant  of  all  differences,  that  of  the  remote 
and  unrelated  races  who  have  seldom  seen 
each  other's  faces,  and  never  been  tinged 
with  each  other's  blood.  Here  we  still  find 
the  same  unvarying  Prussian  principle. 
Any  European  might  feel  a  genuine  fear  of 
the  Yellow  Peril;  and  many  Englishmen, 
Frenchmen,  and  Russians  have  felt  and  ex- 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       43 

pressed  it.  Many  might  say,  and  have  said, 
that  the  Heathen  Chinee  is  very  heathen  in- 
deed; that  if  he  ever  advances  against  us  he 
will  trample  and  torture  and  utterly  destroy, 
in  a  way  that  Eastern  people  do,  but  West- 
ern people  do  not.  Nor  do  I  doubt  the  Ger- 
man Emperor's  sincerity  when  he  sought  to 
point  out  to  us  how  abnormal  and  abomi- 
nable such  a  nightmare  campaign  would  be, 
supposing  that  it  could  ever  come.  But  now 
comes  the  comic  irony;  which  never  fails 
to  follow  on  the  attempt  of  the  Prussian  to 
be  philosophic.  For  the  Kaiser,  after  ex- 
plaining to  his  troops  how  important  it  was 
to  avoid  Eastern  Barbarism,  instantly  com- 
manded them  to  become  Eastern  Barbarians. 
He  told  them,  in  so  many  words,  to  be  Huns : 
and  leave  nothing  living  or  standing  be- 
hind them.  In  fact,  he  frankly  offered  a 
new  army  corps  of  aboriginal  Tartars  to  the 
Far  East,  within  such  time  as  it  may  take  a 


44       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

bewildered  Hanoverian  to  turn  into  a  Tar- 
tar. Any  one  who  has  the  painful  habit  of 
personal  thought,  will  perceive  here  at  once 
the  non-reciprocal  principle  again.  Boiled 
down  to  its  bones  of  logic,  it  means  simply 
this:  "I  am  a  German  and  you  are  a  China- 
man. Therefore  I,  being  a  German,  have 
a  right  to  be  a  Chinaman.  But  you  have  no 
right  to  be  a  Chinaman ;  because  you  are  only 
a  Chinaman."  This  is  probably  the  highest 
point  to  which  the  German  culture  has 
risen. 

The  principle  here  neglected,  which  may 
be  called  Mutuality  by  those  who  misunder- 
stand and  dislike  the  word  Equality,  does 
not  offer  so  clear  a  distinction  between  the 
Prussian  and  the  other  peoples  as  did  the 
first  Prussian  principle  of  an  infinite  and 
destructive  opportunism;  or,  in  other  words, 
the  principle  of  being  unprincipled.  Nor 
upon  this  second  can  one  take  up  so  obvious 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY      45 

a  position  touching  the  other  civilisations  or 
semi-civilisations  of  the  world.  Some  idea 
of  oath  and  bond  there  is  in  the  rudest  tribes, 
in  the  darkest  continents.  But  it  might  be 
maintained,  of  the  more  delicate  and  imagi- 
native element  of  reciprocity,  that  a  cannibal 
in  Borneo  understands  it  almost  as  little  as 
a  professor  in  Berlin.  A  narrow  and  one- 
sided seriousness  is  the  fault  of  barbarians 
all  over  the  world.  This  may  have  been  the 
meaning,  for  aught  I  know,  of  the  one  eye  of 
the  Cyclops:  that  the  Barbarian  cannot  see 
round  things  or  look  at  them  from  two  points 
of  view ;  and  thus  becomes  a  blind  beast  and 
an  eater  of  men.  Certainly  there  can  be  no 
better  summary  of  the  savage  than  this, 
which  as  we  have  seen,  unfits  him  for  the 
duel.  He  is  the  man  who  cannot  love — 
no,  nor  even  hate — his  neighbour  as  himself. 
But  this  quality  in  Prussia  does  have  one 
effect  which  has  reference  to  the  same  ques- 


46       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

tion  of  the  lower  civilisations.  It  disposes 
once  and  for  all  at  least  of  the  civilising 
mission  of  Germany.  Evidently  the  Ger- 
mans are  the  last  people  in  the  world  to  be 
trusted  with  the  task.  They  are  as  short- 
sighted morally  as  physically.  What  is 
their  sophism  of  "necessity"  but  an  inability 
to  imagine  to-morrow  morning4?  What  is 
their  non-reciprocity  but  an  inability  to  im- 
agine, not  a  god  or  devil,  but  merely  another 
man?  Are  these  to  judge  mankind1?  Men 
of  two  tribes  in  Africa  not  only  know  that 
they  are  all  men,  but  can  understand  that 
they  are  all  black  men.  In  this  they  are 
quite  seriously  in  advance  of  the  intellectual 
Prussian;  who  cannot  be  got  to  see  that  we 
are  all  white  men.  The  ordinary  eye  is  un- 
able to  perceive  in  the  North-East  Teuton 
anything  that  marks  him  out  especially 
from  the  more  colourless  classes  of  the  rest 
of  Aryan  mankind.     He  is  simply  a  white 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       47 

man,  with  a  tendency  to  the  grey  or  the  drab. 
Yet  he  will  explain,  in  serious  official  docu- 
ments, that  the  difference  between  him  and 
us  is  a  difference  between  "the  master-race 
and  the  inferior-race."  The  collapse  of 
German  philosophy  always  occurs  at  the  be- 
ginning rather  than  the  end  of  an  argument; 
and  the  difficulty  here  is  that  there  is  no  way 
of  testing  which  is  a  master-race  except  by 
asking  which  is  your  own  race.  If  you  can- 
not find  out  (as  is  usually  the  case)  you  fall 
back  on  the  absurd  occupation  of  writing 
history  about  pre-historic  times.  But  I 
suggest  quite  seriously  that  if  the  Germans 
can  give  their  philosophy  to  the  Hottentots, 
there  is  no  reason  why  they  should  not  give 
their  sense  of  superiority  to  the  Hottentots. 
If  they  can  see  such  fine  shades  between  the 
Goth  and  the  Gaul,  there  is  no  reason  why 
similar  shades  should  not  lift  the  savage 
above    other    savages;    why    any    Ojibway 


48       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

should  not  discover  that  he  is  one  tint  redder 
than  the  Dacotahs;  or  any  nigger  in  the 
Cameroons  say  he  is  not  so  black  as  he  is 
painted.  For  this  principle  of  a  quite  un- 
proved racial  supremacy  is  the  last  and  worst 
of  the  refusals  of  reciprocity.  The  Prus- 
sian calls  all  men  to  admire  the  beauty  of  his 
large  blue  eyes.  If  they  do,  it  is  because 
they  have  inferior  eyes:  if  they  don't,  it  is 
because  they  have  no  eyes. 

Wherever  the  most  miserable  remnant  of 
our  race,  astray  and  dried  up  in  deserts,  or 
buried  forever  under  the  fall  of  bad  civili- 
sations, has  some  feeble  memory  that  men 
are  men,  that  bargains  are  bargains,  that 
there  are  two  sides  to  a  question,  or  even 
that  it  takes  two  to  make  a  quarrel — that 
remnant  has  the  right  to  resist  the  New  Cul- 
ture, to  the  knife  and  club  and  the  splintered 
stone.  For  the  Prussian  begins  all  his  cul- 
ture by  that  act  which  is  the  destruction  of 


THE  REFUSAL  OF  RECIPROCITY       49 

all  creative  thought  and  constructive  action. 
He  breaks  that  mirror  in  the  mind,  in  which 
a  man  can  see  the  face  of  his  friend  or  foe. 


Ill 

THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

The  German  Emperor  has  reproached  this 
country  with  allying  itself  with  "barbaric 
and  semi-oriental  power."  We  have  already 
considered  in  what  sense  we  use  the  word 
barbaric :  it  is  in  the  sense  of  one  who  is  hos- 
tile to  civilisation,  not  one  who  is  insufficient 
in  it.  But  when  we  pass  from  the  idea  of 
the  barbaric  to  the  idea  of  the  oriental,  the 
case  is  even  more  curious.  There  is  nothing 
particularly  Tartar  in  Russian  affairs,  ex- 
cept the  fact  that  Russia  expelled  the  Tar- 
tars. The  Eastern  invader  occupied  and 
crushed  the  country  for  many  years ;  but  that 
is  equally  true  of  Greece,  of  Spain  and  even 
of  Austria.  If  Russia  has  suffered  from  the 
East  she  has  suffered  in  order  to  resist  it: 
and  it  is  rather  hard  that  the  very  miracle 
50 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       51 

of  her  escape  should  make  a  mystery  about 
her  origin.  Jonah  may  or  may  not  have 
been  three  days  inside  a  fish,  but  that  does 
not  make  him  a  merman.  And  in  all  the 
other  cases  of  European  nations  who  escaped 
the  monstrous  captivity,  we  do  admit  the 
purity  and  continuity  of  the  European  type. 
We  consider  the  old  Eastern  rule  as  a  wound, 
but  not  as  a  stain.  Copper-coloured  men  out 
of  Africa  overruled  for  centuries  the  religion 
and  patriotism  of  Spaniards.  Yet  I  have 
never  heard  that  Don  Quixote  was  an  Afri- 
can fable  on  the  lines  of  Uncle  Remus.  I 
have  never  heard  that  the  heavy  black  in  the 
pictures  of  Velasquez  was  due  to  a  negro  an- 
cestry. In  the  case  of  Spain,  which  is  close 
to  us,  we  can  recognise  the  resurrection  of  a 
Christian  and  cultured  nation  after  its  age 
of  bondage.  But  Russia  is  rather  remote; 
and  those  to  whom  nations  are  but  names  in 
newspapers  can  really  fancy,  like  Mr.  Bar- 


52       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

ing's  friend,  that  all  Russian  churches  are 
"mosques."  ,Yet  the  land  of  Turgenev  is 
not  a  wilderness  of  fakirs;  and  even  the  fa- 
natical Russian  is  as  proud  of  being  different 
from  the  Mongol,  as  the  fanatical  Spaniard 
was  proud  of  being  different  from  the  Moor. 
The  town  of  Reading,  as  it  exists,  offers 
few  opportunities  for  piracy  on  the  high 
seas:  yet  it  was  the  camp  of  the  pirates  in 
Alfred's  day.  I  should  think  it  hard  to  call 
the  people  of  Berkshire  half-Danish,  merely 
because  they  drove  out  the  Danes.  In  short, 
some  temporary  submergence  under  the  sav- 
age flood  was  the  fate  of  many  of  the  most 
civilised  states  of  Christendom;  and  it  is 
quite  ridiculous  to  argue  that  Russia,  which 
wrestled  hardest,  must  have  recovered  least. 
Everywhere,  doubtless,  the  East  spread  a 
sort  of  enamel  over  the  conquered  countries, 
but  everywhere  the  enamel  cracked.  Actual 
history,   in  fact,  is  exactly  opposite  to  the 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       53 

cheap  proverb  invented  against  the  Musco- 
vite. It  is  not  true  to  say  "Scratch  a  Rus- 
sian and  you  find  a  Tartar."  In  the  darkest 
hour  of  the  barbaric  dominion  it  was  truer  to 
say,  "Scratch  a  Tartar  and  you  find  a  Rus- 
sian." It  was  the  civilisation  that  survived 
under  all  the  barbarism.  This  vital  ro- 
mance of  Russia,  this  revolution  against 
Asia,  can  be  proved  in  pure  fact:  not  only 
from  the  almost  superhuman  activity  of 
Russia  during  the  struggle,  but  also  (which 
is  much  rarer  as  human  history  goes)  by  her 
quite  consistent  conduct  since.  She  is  the 
only  great  nation  which  has  really  expelled 
the  Mongol  from  her  country,  and  continued 
to  protest  against  the  presence  of  the  Mon- 
gol in  her  continent.  Knowing  what  he  had 
been  in  Russia,  she  knew  what  he  would  be 
in  Europe.  In  this  she  pursued  a  logical 
line  of  thought  which  was,  if  anything,  too 
unsympathetic   with  the  energies  and  reli- 


54       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

gions  of  the  East.  Every  other  country,  one 
may  say,  has  been  an  ally  of  the  Turk;  that 
is,  of  the  Mongol  and  the  Moslem.  The 
French  played  them  as  pieces  against  Aus- 
tria; the  English  warmly  supported  them  un- 
der the  Palmerston  regime;  even  the  young 
Italians  sent  troops  to  the  Crimea;  and  of 
Prussia  and  her  Austrian  vassal  it  is  nowa- 
days needless  to  speak.  For  good  or  evil,  it 
is  the  fact  of  history  that  Russia  is  the  only 
Power  in  Europe  that  has  never  supported 
the  Crescent  against  the  Cross. 

That,  doubtless,  will  appear  an  unimpor- 
tant matter;  but  it  may  become  important 
under  certain  peculiar  conditions.  Suppose, 
for  the  sake  of  argument,  that  there  were  a 
powerful  prince  in  Europe  who  had  gone  os- 
tentatiously out  of  his  way  to  pay  reverence 
to  the  remains  of  the  Tartar,  Mongol  and 
Moslem,  left  as  an  outpost  in  Europe.  Sup- 
pose there  were  a  Christian  Emperor  who 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       55 

could  not  even  go  to  the  tomb  of  the  Cruci- 
fied, without  pausing  to  congratulate  the  last 
and  living  crucifier.  If  there  were  an  Em- 
peror who  gave  guns  and  guides  and  maps 
and  drill  instructors  to  defend  the  remains 
of  the  Mongol  in  Christendom,  what  should 
we  say  to  him?  I  think  at  least  we  might 
ask  him  what  he  meant  by  his  impudence, 
when  he  talked  about  supporting  a  semi- 
oriental  power.  That  we  support  a  semi- 
oriental  power,  we  deny.  That  he  has  sup- 
ported an  entirely  oriental  power  cannot  be 
denied — no,  not  even  by  the  man  who  did 
it. 

But  here  is  to  be  noted  the  essential  differ- 
ence between  Russia  and  Prussia;  especially 
by  those  who  use  the  ordinary  Liberal  ar- 
guments against  the  latter.  Russia  has  a 
policy  which  she  pursues,  if  you  will,  through 
evil  and  good;  but  at  least  so  as  to  produce 
good  as  well  as  evil.     Let  it  be  granted  that 


56       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

the  policy  has  made  her  oppressive  to  the 
Finns  and  the  Poles — though  the  Russian 
Poles  feel  far  less  oppressed  than  do  the 
Prussian  Poles.     But  it  is  a  mere  historic 
fact,  that  if  Russia  has  been  a  despot  to  some 
small  nations,  she  has  been  a  deliverer  to 
others.     She  did,  so  far  as  in  her  lay,  eman- 
cipate  the   Servians   or   the    Montenegrins. 
But  whom  did  Prussia  ever  emancipate — 
even  by  accident1?     It  is  indeed  somewhat 
extraordinary  that  in  the  perpetual  permuta- 
tions of  international  politics  the  Hohenzol- 
lerns  have  never  gone  astray  into  the  path  of 
enlightenment.     They  have  been  in  alliance 
with   almost   everybody   off   and   on;   with 
France,  with  England,   with  Austria,  with 
Russia.     Can  any  one  candidly  say  that  they 
have  left  on  any  one  of  these  people  the 
faintest  impress  of  progress  or  liberation? 
Prussia  was  the  enemy  of  the  French  Mon- 
archy; but  a  worse  enemy  of  the   French 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       57 

Revolution.  Prussia  had  been  an  enemy  of 
the  Czar;  but  she  was  a  worse  enemy  of  the 
Duma.  Prussia  totally  disregarded  Aus- 
trian rights;  but  she  is  to-day  quite  ready  to 
inflict  Austrian  wrongs.  This  is  the  strong 
particular  difference  between  the  one  empire 
and  the  other.  Russia  is  pursuing  certain 
intelligible  and  sincere  ends,  which  to  her  at 
least  are  ideals,  and  for  which,  therefore,  she 
will  make  sacrifices  and  will  protect  the 
weak.  But  the  North  German  soldier  is  a 
sort  of  abstract  tyrant,  everywhere  and  al- 
ways on  the  side  of  materialistic  tyranny. 
This  Teuton  in  uniform  has  been  found  in 
strange  places ;  shooting  farmers  before  Sara- 
toga and  flogging  soldiers  in  Surrey,  hanging 
niggers  in  Africa  and  raping  girls  in  Wick- 
low;  but  never,  by  some  mysterious  fatality, 
lending  a  hand  to  the  freeing  of  a  single  city 
or  the  independence  of  one  solitary  flag. 
Wherever  scorn  and  prosperous  oppression 


58       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

are,  there  is  the  Prussian ;  unconsciously  con- 
sistent, instinctively  restrictive,  innocently 
evil;  "following  darkness  like  a  dream." 

Suppose  we  heard  of  a  person  (gifted  with 
some  longevity)  who  had  helped  Alva  to 
persecute  Dutch  Protestants,  then  helped 
Cromwell  to  persecute  Irish  Catholics,  and 
then  helped  Claverhouse  to  persecute  Scotch 
Puritans,  we  should  find  it  rather  easier  to 
call  him  a  persecutor  than  to  call  him  a 
Protestant  or  a  Catholic.  Curiously  enough 
this  is  actually  the  position  in  which  the  Prus- 
sian stands  in  Europe.  No  argument  can 
alter  the  fact  that  in  three  converging  and 
conclusive  cases  he  has  been  on  the  side  of 
three  distinct  rulers  of  different  religions, 
who  had  nothing  whatever  in  common  except 
that  they  were  ruling  oppressively.  In 
these  three  Governments,  taken  separately, 
one  can  see  something  excusable  or  at  least 
human.     When  the  Kaiser  encouraged  the 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       59 

Russian  rulers  to  crush  the  Revolution,  the 
Russian  rulers  undoubtedly  believed  they 
were  wrestling  with  an  inferno  of  atheism 
and  anarchy.  A  Socialist  of  the  ordinary 
English  kind  cried  out  upon  me  when  I  spoke 
of  Stolypin,  and  said  he  was  chiefly  known 
by  the  halter  called  "Stolypin's  Necktie." 
As  a  fact,  there  were  many  other  things  in- 
teresting about  Stolypin  besides  his  necktie: 
his  policy  of  peasant  proprietorship,  his  ex- 
traordinary personal  courage,  and  certainly 
none  more  interesting  than  that  movement 
in  his  death  agony,  when  he  made  the  sign  of 
the  cross  towards  the  Czar,  as  the  crown  and 
captain  of  his  Christianity.  But  the  Kaiser 
does  not  regard  the  Czar  as  the  captain  of 
Christianity.  Far  from  it.  What  he  sup- 
ported in  Stolypin  was  the  necktie  and  noth- 
ing but  the  necktie :  the  gallows  and  not  the 
cross.  The  Russian  ruler  did  believe  that 
the  Orthodox  Church  was  orthodox.     The 


60       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Austrian  Archduke  did  really  desire  to  make 
the  Catholic  Church  catholic.  He  did 
really  believe  that  he  was  being  Pro-Catholic 
in  being  Pro-Austrian.  But  the  Kaiser  can- 
not be  Pro-Catholic,  and  therefore  cannot 
have  been  really  Pro-Austrian,  he  was  simply 
and  solely  Anti-Servian.  Nay,  even  in  the 
cruel  and  sterile  strength  of  Turkey,  any  one 
with  imagination  can  see  something  of  the 
tragedy  and  therefore  of  the  tenderness  of 
true  belief.  The  worst  that  can  be  said  of 
the  Moslems  is,  as  the  poet  put  it,  they  of- 
fered to  man  the  choice  of  the  Koran  or  the 
sword.  The  best  that  can  be  said  for  the 
German  is  that  he  does  not  care  about  the 
Koran,  but  is  satisfied  if  he  can  have  the 
sword.  And  for  me,  I  confess,  even  the  sins 
of  these  three  other  striving  empires  take  on, 
in  comparison,  something  that  is  sorrowful 
and  dignified :  and  I  feel  they  do  not  deserve 
that  this  little  Lutheran  lounger  should  pat- 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       61 

ronise  all  that  is  evil  in  them,  while  ignoring 
all  that  is  good.  He  is  not  Catholic,  he  is 
not  Orthodox,  he  is  not  Mahomedan.  He 
is  merely  an  old  gentleman  who  wishes  to 
share  the  crime  though  he  cannot  share  the 
creed.  He  desires  to  be  a  persecutor  by  the 
pang  without  the  palm.  So  strongly  do  all 
the  instincts  of  the  Prussian  drive  against 
liberty,  that  he  would  rather  oppress  other 
people's  subjects  than  think  of  anybody  go- 
ing without  the  benefits  of  oppression.  He 
is  a  sort  of  disinterested  despot.  He  is  as 
disinterested  as  the  devil  who  is  ready  to  do 
any  one's  dirty  work. 

This  would  seem  obviously  fantastic  were 
it  not  supported  by  solid  facts  which  cannot 
be  explained  otherwise.  Indeed  it  would  be 
inconceivable  if  we  were  thinking  of  a  whole 
people,  consisting  of  free  and  varied  indi- 
viduals. But  in  Prussia  the  governing  class 
is  really  a  governing  class:  and  a  very  few 


62       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

people  are  needed  to  think  along  these  lines 
to  make  all  the  other  people  act  along  them. 
And  the  paradox  of  Prussia  is   this:   that 
while  its  princes  and  nobles  have  no  other 
aim  on  this  earth  but  to  destroy  democracy 
wherever  it  shows  itself,  they  have  contrived 
to  get  themselves  trusted,  not  as  wardens  of 
the  past  but  as  forerunners  of  the  future. 
Even  they  cannot  believe  that  their  theory  is 
popular,  but  they  do  believe  that  it  is  pro- 
gressive.    Here  again  we  find  the  spiritual 
chasm  between  the  two  monarchies  in  ques- 
tion.    The  Russian  institutions  are,  in  many 
cases,  really  left  in  the  rear  of  the  Russian 
people,    and   many   of   the   Russian   people 
know  it.     But  the  Prussian  institutions  are 
supposed  to  be  in  advance  of  the  Prussian 
people,  and  most  of  the  Prussian  people  be- 
lieve it.     It  is  thus  much  easier  for  the  war- 
lords to  go  everywhere  and  impose  a  hopeless 
slavery  upon  every  one,  for  they  have  al- 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       63 

ready  imposed  a  sort  of  hopeful  slavery  on 
their  own  simple  race. 

And  when  men  shall  speak  to  us  of  the 
hoary  iniquities  of  Russia  and  of  how  an- 
tiquated is  the  Russian  system,  we  shall  an- 
swer "Yes;  that  is  the  superiority  of  Rus- 
sia." Their  institutions  are  part  of  their  his- 
tory, whether  as  relics  or  fossils.  Their 
abuses  have  really  been  uses:  that  is  to  say, 
they  have  been  used  up.  If  they  have  old 
engines  of  terror  or  torment,  they  may  fall 
to  pieces  from  mere  rust,  like  an  old  coat  of 
armour.  But  in  the  case  of  the  Prussian  tyr- 
anny, if  it  be  tyranny  at  all,  it  is  the  whole 
point  of  its  claim  that  it  is  not  antiquated, 
but  just  going  to  begin,  like  the  showman. 
Prussia  has  a  whole  thriving  factory  of 
thumbscrews,  a  whole  humming  workshop 
of  wheels  and  racks,  of  the  newest  and  neat- 
est pattern,  with  which  to  win  back  Europe 
to    the    Reaction  .  .  .  infandum    renovare 


64       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

dolorem.  And  if  we  wish  to  test  the  truth 
of  this,  it  can  be  done  by  the  same  method 
which  showed  us  that  Russia,  if  her  race  or 
religion  could  sometimes  make  her  an  in- 
vader and  an  oppressor,  could  also  be  made 
an  emancipator  and  a  knight  errant.  In  the 
same  way,  if  the  Russian  institutions  are  old- 
fashioned,  they  honestly  exhibit  the  good  as 
well  as  the  bad  that  can  be  found  in  old- 
fashioned  things.  In  their  police  system 
they  have  an  inequality  which  is  against  our 
ideas  of  law.  But  in  their  commune  system 
they  have  an  equality  that  is  older  than  law 
itself.  Even  when  they  flogged  each  other 
like  barbarians,  they  called  upon  each  other 
by  their  Christian  names  like  children.  At 
their  worst  they  retained  all  the  best  of  a 
rude  society.  At  their  best,  they  are  simply 
good,  like  good  children  or  good  nuns.  But 
in  Prussia  all  that  is  best  in  the  civilised 
machinery  is  put  at  the  service  of  all  that  is 


THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY       65 

worst  in  the  barbaric  mind.  Here  again 
the  Prussian  has  no  accidental  merits, 
none  of  those  lucky  survivals,  none  of  those 
late  repentances,  which  make  the  patchwork 
glory  of  Russia.  Here  all  is  sharpened  to  a 
point  and  pointed  to  a  purpose  and  that  pur- 
pose, if  words  and  acts  have  any  meaning  at 
all,  is  the  destruction  of  liberty  throughout 
the  world. 


IV 
THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY 

In  considering  the  Prussian  point  of  view 
we  have  been  considering  what  seems  to  be 
mainly  a  mental  limitation:  a  kind  of  knot 
in  the  brain.  Towards  the  problem  of  Slav 
population,  of  English  colonisation,  of 
French  armies  and  reinforcements,  it  shows 
the  same  strange  philosophic  sulks.  So  far 
as  I  can  follow  it,  it  seems  to  amount  to  say- 
ing "It  is  very  wrong  that  you  should  be 
superior  to  me,  because  I  am  superior  to 
you."  The  spokesmen  of  this  system  seem 
to  have  a  curious  capacity  for  concentrating 
this  entanglement  or  contradiction,  some- 
times into  a  single  paragraph,  or  even  a 
single  sentence.  I  have  already  referred  to 
the  German  Emperor's  celebrated  suggestion 
that  in  order  to  avert  the  peril  of  Hunnish- 
66 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  67 

ness  we  should  all  become  Huns.  A  much 
stronger  instance  is  his  more  recent  order  to 
his  troops  touching  the  war  in  Northern 
France.  As  most  people  know,  his  words 
ran  "It  is  my  Royal  and  Imperial  command 
that  you  concentrate  your  energies,  for  the 
immediate  present,  upon  one  single  purpose, 
and  that  is  that  you  address  all  your  skill  and 
all  the  valour  of  my  soldiers  to  exterminate 
first  the  treacherous  English  and  to  walk 
over  General  French's  contemptible  little 
Army."  The  rudeness  of  the  remark  an 
Englishman  can  afford  to  pass  over;  what  I 
am  interested  in  is  the  mentality;  the  train 
of  thought  that  can  manage  to  entangle  it- 
self even  in  so  brief  a  space.  If  French's 
little  Army  is  contemptible,  it  would  seem 
clear  that  all  the  skill  and  valour  of  the  Ger- 
man Army  had  better  not  be  concentrated  on 
it,  but  on  the  larger  and  less  contemptible  al- 
lies.    If  all  the  skill  and  valour  of  the  Ger- 


68       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

man  Army  are  concentrated  on  it,  it  is  not 
being  treated  as  contemptible.  But  the 
Prussian  rhetorician  had  two  incompatible 
sentiments  in  his  mind;  and  he  insisted  on 
saying  them  both  at  once.  He  wanted  to 
think  of  an  English  Army  as  a  small  thing; 
but  he  also  wanted  to  think  of  an  English 
defeat  as  a  big  thing.  He  wanted  to  exult, 
at  the  same  moment,  in  the  utter  weakness 
of  the  British  in  their  attack;  and  the  su- 
preme skill  and  valour  of  the  Germans  in 
repelling  such  an  attack.  Somehow  it  must 
be  made  a  common  and  obvious  collapse  for 
England;  and  yet  a  daring  and  unexpected 
triumph  for  Germany.  In  trying  to  express 
these  contradictory  conceptions  simulta- 
neously, he  got  rather  mixed.  Therefore  he 
bade  Germania  fill  all  her  vales  and  moun- 
tains with  the  dying  agonies  of  this  almost 
invisible  earwig;  and  let  the  impure  blood  of 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  69 

this  cockroach  redden  the  Rhine  down  to  the 
sea. 

But  it  would  be  unfair  to  base  the  criti- 
cism on  the  utterance  of  any  accidental  and 
hereditary  prince:  and  it  is  quite  equally 
clear  in  the  case  of  the  philosophers  who 
have  been  held  up  to  us,  even  in  England,  as 
the  very  prophets  of  progress.  And  in  noth- 
ing is  it  shown  more  sharply  than  in  the  curi- 
ous confused  talk  about  Race  and  especially 
about  the  Teutonic  Race.  Professor  Har- 
nack  and  similar  people  are  reproaching  us, 
I  understand,  for  having  broken  "the  bond 
of  Teutonism" :  a  bond  which  the  Prussians 
have  strictly  observed  both  in  breach  and  ob- 
servance. We  note  it  in  their  open  annexa- 
tion of  lands  wholly  inhabited  by  negroes, 
such  as  Denmark.  We  note  it  equally  in 
their  instant  and  joyful  recognition  of  the 
flaxen  hair  and  light  blue  eyes  of  the  Turks. 


7o        THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

But  it  is  still  the  abstract  principle  of  Pro- 
fessor Harnack  which  interests  me  most;  and 
in  following  it  I  have  the  same  complexity 
of  enquiry,  but  the  same  simplicity  of  result. 
Comparing  the  Professor's  concern  about 
"Teutonism"  with  his  unconcern  about  Bel- 
gium, I  can  only  reach  the  following  result: 
"A  man  need  not  keep  a  promise  he  has  made. 
But  a  man  must  keep  a  promise  he  has  not 
made."  There  certainly  was  a  treaty  bind- 
ing Britain  to  Belgium;  if  it  was  only  a  scrap 
of  paper.  If  there  was  any  treaty  binding 
Britain  to  Teutonism  it  is,  to  say  the  least 
of  it,  a  lost  scrap  of  paper :  almost  what  one 
might  call  a  scrap  of  waste-paper.  Here 
again  the  pendants  under  consideration  ex- 
hibit the  illogical  perversity  that  makes  the 
brain  reel.  There  is  obligation  and  there  is 
no  obligation:  sometimes  it  appears  that 
Germany  and  England  must  keep  faith  with 
each  other;  sometimes  that  Germany  need 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  71 

not  keep  faith  with  anybody  and  anything; 
sometimes  that  we  alone  among  European 
peoples  are  almost  entitled  to  be  Germans; 
sometimes  that  beside  us  Russians  and 
Frenchmen  almost  rise  to  a  Germanic  love- 
liness of  character.  But  through  all  there  is, 
hazy  but  not  hypocritical,  this  sense  of  some 
common  Teutonism. 

Professor  Haeckel,  another  of  the  wit- 
nesses raised  up  against  us,  attained  to  some 
celebrity  at  one  time  through  proving  the 
remarkable  resemblance  between  two  differ- 
ent things  by  printing  duplicate  pictures  of 
the  same  thing.  Professor  Haeckel's  con- 
tribution to  biology,  in  this  case,  was  exactly 
like  Professor  Harnack's  contribution  to 
ethnology.  Professor  Harnack  knows  what 
a  German  is  like.  When  he  wants  to  imag- 
ine what  an  Englishman  is  like,  he  simply 
photographs  the  same  German  over  again. 
In  both  cases  there  is  probably  sincerity  as 


72        THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

well  as  simplicity.  Haeckel  was  so  certain 
that  the  species  illustrated  in  embyro  really 
are  closely  related  and  linked  up,  that  it 
seemed  to  him  a  small  thing  to  simplify  it  by 
mere  repetition.  Harnack  is  so  certain  that 
the  German  and  Englishman  are  almost  alike, 
that  he  really  risks  the  generalisation  that 
they  are  exactly  alike.  He  photographs,  so 
to  speak,  the  same  fair  and  foolish  face  twice 
over;  and  calls  it  a  remarkable  resemblance 
between  cousins.  Thus  he  can  prove  the  ex- 
istence of  Teutonism  just  about  as  conclu- 
sively as  Haeckel  has  proved  the  more  ten- 
able proposition  of  the  non-existence  of  God. 
Now  the  German  and  the  Englishman  are 
not  in  the  least  alike — except  in  the  sense 
that  neither  of  them  are  negroes.  They  are, 
in  everything  good  and  evil,  more  unlike 
than  any  other  two  men  we  can  take  at  ran- 
dom from  the  great  European  family.  They 
are  opposite  from  the  roots  of  their  history, 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  73 

nay,  of  their  geography.  It  is  an  under- 
statement to  call  Britain  insular.  Britain 
is  not  only  an  island,  but  an  island  slashed 
by  the  sea  till  it  nearly  splits  into  three  is- 
lands; and  even  the  Midlands  can  almost 
smell  the  salt.  Germany  is  a  powerful, 
beautiful  and  fertile  inland  country,  which 
can  only  find  the  sea  by  one  or  two  twisted 
and  narrow  paths,  as  people  find  a  subter- 
ranean lake.  Thus  the  British  Navy  is 
really  national  because  it  is  natural;  it  has 
co-hered  out  of  hundreds  of  accidental  ad- 
ventures of  ships  and  shipmen  before  Chau- 
cer's time  and  after  it.  But  the  German 
Navy  is  an  artificial  thing;  as  artificial  as  a 
constructed  Alp  would  be  in  England.  Wil- 
liam II  has  simply  copied  the  British  Navy 
as  Frederick  II  copied  the  French  Army: 
and  this  Japanese  or  anti-like  assiduity  in 
imitation  is  one  of  the  hundred  qualities 
which  the  Germans  have  and  the  English 


74       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

markedly  have  not.  There  are  other  Ger- 
man superiorities  which  are  very  much  su- 
perior. The  one  or  two  really  jolly  things 
that  the  Germans  have  got  are  precisely  the 
things  which  the  English  haven't  got:  not- 
ably a  real  habit  of  popular  music  and  of  the 
ancient  songs  of  the  people,  not  merely 
spreading  from  the  towns  or  caught  from  the 
professionals.  In  this  the  Germans  rather 
resemble  the  Welsh:  though  heaven  knows 
what  becomes  of  Teutonism  if  they  do.  But 
the  difference  between  the  Germans  and  the 
English  goes  deeper  than  all  these  signs  of 
it;  they  differ  more  than  any  other  two 
Europeans  in  the  normal  posture  of  the  mind. 
Above  all,  they  differ  in  what  is  the  most 
English  of  all  English  traits;  that  shame 
which  the  French  may  be*  right  in  calling 
"the  bad  shame";  for  it  is  certainly  mixed 
up  with  pride  and  suspicion,  the  upshot  of 
which  we  call  shyness.     Even  an  English- 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  75 

man's  rudeness  is  often  rooted  in  his  being 
embarrassed.  But  a  German's  rudeness  is 
rooted  in  his  never  being  embarrassed.  He 
eats  and  makes  love  noisily.  He  never  feels 
a  speech  or  a  song  or  a  sermon  or  a  large 
meal  to  be  what  the  English  call  "out  of 
place"  in  particular  circumstances.  When 
Germans  are  patriotic  and  religious  they 
have  no  re-actions  against  patriotism  and 
religion  as  have  the  English  and  the  French. 
Nay,  the  mistake  of  Germany  in  the  modern 
disaster  largely  arose  from  the  facts  that  she 
thought  England  was  simple  when  England 
is  very  subtle.  She  thought  that  because 
our  politics  have  become  largely  financial 
that  they  had  become  wholly  financial;  that 
because  our  aristocrats  had  become  pretty 
cynical  that  they  had  become  entirely  cor- 
rupt. They  could  not  seize  the  subtlety  by 
which  a  rather  used-up  English  gentleman 
might  sell  a  coronet  when  he  would  not  sell 


76       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

a  fortress;  might  lower  the  public  standards 
and  yet  refuse  to  lower  the  flag.  In  short, 
the  Germans  are  quite  sure  that  they  under- 
stand us  entirely,  because  they  do  not  un- 
derstand us  at  all.  Possibly  if  they  began 
to  understand  us  they  might  hate  us  even 
more:  but  I  would  rather  be  hated  for  some 
small  but  real  reason  than  pursued  with  love 
on  account  of  all  kinds  of  qualities  which 
I  do  not  possess  and  which  I  do  not  desire. 
And  when  the  Germans  get  their  first  genuine 
glimpse  of  what  modern  England  is  like  they 
will  discover  that  England  has  a  very  broken, 
belated  and  inadequate  sense  of  having  an 
obligation  to  Europe,  but  no  sort  of  sense 
whatever  of  having  any  obligation  to  Teu- 
tonism. 

This  is  the  last  and  strongest  of  the 
Prussian  qualities  we  have  here  considered. 
There  is  in  stupidity  of  this  sort  a  strange 
slippery  strength :  because  it  can  be  not  only 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  77 

outside  rules  but  outside  reason.  The  man 
who  really  cannot  see  that  he  is  contradicting 
himself  has  a  great  advantage  in  controversy; 
though  the  advantage  breaks  down  when  he 
tries  to  reduce  it  to  simple  addition,  to  chess, 
or  to  the  game  called  war.  It  is  the  same 
about  the  stupidity  of  the  one-sided  kinship. 
The  drunkard  who  is  quite  certain  that  a 
total  stranger  is  his  long-lost  brother,  has  a 
greater  advantage  until  it  comes  to  matters 
of  detail.  "We  must  have  chaos  within" 
said  Nietzsche,  "that  we  may  give  birth  to  a 
dancing  star." 

In  these  slight  notes  I  have  suggested  the 
principal  strong  points  of  the  Prussian  char- 
acter. A  failure  in  honour  which  almost 
amounts  to  a  failure  in  memory:  an  ego- 
mania that  is  honestly  blind  to  the  fact  that 
the  other  party  is  an  ego;  and,  above  all,  an 
actual  itch  for  tyranny  and  interference,  the 
devil   which   everywhere   torments   the   idle 


78       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

and  the  proud.  To  these  must  be  added  a 
certain  mental  shapelessness  which  can  ex- 
pand or  contract  without  reference  to  reason 
or  record;  a  potential  infinity  of  excuses.  If 
the  English  had  been  on  the  German  side, 
the  German  professors  would  have  noted 
what  irresistible  energies  had  evolved  the 
Teutons.  As  the  English  are  on  the  other 
side,  the  German  professors  will  say  that 
these  Teutons  were  not  sufficiently  evolved. 
Or  they  will  say  that  they  were  just  suffi- 
ciently evolved  to  show  that  they  were  not 
Teutons.  Probably  they  will  say  both. 
But  the  truth  is  that  all  that  they  call  evolu- 
tion should  rather  be  called  evasion.  They 
tell  us  they  are  opening  windows  of  enlight- 
enment and  doors  of  progress.  The  truth  is 
that  they  are  breaking  up  the  whole  house  of 
the  human  intellect,  that  they  may  abscond  in 
any  direction.  There  is  an  ominous  and  al- 
most monstrous  parallel  between  the  posi- 


THE  ESCAPE  OF  FOLLY  79 

tion  of  their  over-rated  philosophers  and  of 
their  comparatively  under-rated  soldiers. 
For  what  their  professors  call  roads  of  prog- 
ress are  really  routes  of  escape. 


LETTERS  TO  AN  OLD  GARIBALDIAN 

Italy,  twice  hast  thou  spoken ;  and  time  is  athirst 

for  the  third. 

— Swinburne. 

My  Dear 


It  is  a  long  time  since  we  met;  and  I  fear 
these  letters  may  never  reach  you.  But  in 
these  violent  times  I  remember  with  a  curi- 
ous vividness  how  you  brandished  a  paint- 
brush about  your  easel  when  I  was  a  boy ;  and 
how  it  thrilled  me  to  think  that  you  had  so 
brandished  a  bayonet  against  the  Teutons — 
I  hope  With  the  same  precision  and  happy 
results.  Round  about  that  period,  the  very 
pigments  seemed  to  have  some  sort  of  pictur- 
esque connection  with  your  national  story. 
There  seemed  to  be  something  gorgeous  and 

terrible  about  Venetian  Red;  and  something 

80 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       81 

quite  catastrophic  about  Burnt  Sienna.  But 
somehow  or  other,  when  I  saw  in  the  street 
yesterday  the  colours  on  your  flag,  it  re- 
minded me  of  the  colours  on  your  palette. 

You  need  not  fear  that  I  shall  try  to  en- 
tangle you  or  your  countrymen  in  the  mat- 
ters which  it  is  for  Italians  alone  to  decide. 
You  know  the  perils  of  either  course  much 
better  than  I  do.  Italy,  most  assuredly,  has 
no  need  to  prove  her  courage.  She  has 
risked  everything  in  standing  out  that  she 
could  risk  by  coming  in.  The  proclamations 
and  press  of  Germany  make  it  plain  that  the 
Germans  have  risen  to  a  height  of  sensibility 
hardly  to  be  distinguished  from  madness. 
Supposing  the  nightmare  of  a  Prussian  vic- 
tory, they  will  revenge  themselves  on  things 
more  remote  than  the  Triple  Alliance. 
There  was  a  promise  of  peace  between  them 
and  Belgium;  there  was  none  between  them 
and    England.     The    promise    to    Belgium 


82       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

they  broke.  The  promise  of  England  they 
invented.  It  is  called  the  Treaty  of  Teuton- 
ism.  No  one  ever  heard  of  it  in  this  coun- 
try; but  it  seems  well  known  in  academic  cir- 
cles in  Germany.  It  seems  to  be  something, 
connected  with  the  colour  of  one's  hair. 
But  I  repeat  that  I  am  not  concerned  to  in- 
terfere with  your  decision,  save  in  so  far  as 
I  may  provide  some  materials  for  it  by  de- 
scribing our  own. 

For  I  think  the  first,  perhaps  the  only, 
fruitful  work  an  Englishman  can  do  now  for 
the  formation  of  foreign  opinion  is  to  talk 
about  what  he  really  understands,  the  condi- 
tion of  British  opinion.  It  is  as  simple  as  it 
is  solid.  For  the  first  time,  perhaps,  what 
we  call  the  United  Kingdom  entirely  de- 
serves its  name.  There  has  been  nothing 
like  such  unanimity  within  an  Englishman's 
recollection.  The  Irish  and  even  the  Welsh 
were  largely  pro-Boers,  so  were  some  of  the 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDI  AN        83 

most  English  of  the  English.  No  one  could 
have  been  more  English  than  Fox,  yet  he  de- 
nounced the  war  with  Napoleon.  No  one 
could  be  more  English  than  Cobden,  but  he 
denounced  the  war  in  the  Crimea.  It  is 
really  extraordinary  to  find  a  united  Eng- 
land. Indeed,  until  lately,  it  was  extraor- 
dinary to  find  a  united  Englishman.  Those 
of  us  who,  like  the  present  writer,  repudiated 
the  South  African  war  from  its  beginnings, 
had  yet  a  divided 'heart  in  the  matter,  and 
felt  certain  aspects  of  it  as  glorious  as  well 
as  infamous.  The  first  fact  I  can  offer  you 
is  the  unquestionable  fact  that  all  these 
doubts  and  divisions  have  ceased.  Nor  have 
they  ceased  by  any  compromise;  but  by  a 
universal  flash  of  faith — or,  if  you  will,  of 
suspicion.  Nor  were  our  internal  conflicts 
lightly  abandoned;  nor  our  reconciliations  an 
easy  matter.  I  am,  as  you  are,  a  democrat 
and  a  citizen  of  Europe;  and  my  friends  and 


84       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

I  had  grown  to  loathe  the  plutocracy  and 
privilege  which  sat  in  the  high  places  of  our 
country  with  a  loathing  which  we  thought 
no  love  could  cast  out.  Of  these  rich  men  I 
will  not  speak  here;  with  your  permission, 
I  will  not  think  of  them.  War  is  a  terrible 
business  in  any  case ;  and  to  some  intellectual 
temperaments  this  is  the  most  terrible  part 
of  it.  That  war  takes  the  young;  that  war 
sunders  the  lovers;  that  all  over  Europe 
brides  and  bridegrooms  are  parting  at  the 
church  door:  all  that  is  only  a  commonplace 
to  commonplace  people.  To  give  up  one's 
love  for  one's  country  is  very  great.  But  to 
give  up  one's  hate  for  one's  country,  this  may 
also  have  in  it  something  of  pride  and  some- 
thing of  purification. 

What  is  it  that  has  made  the  British  peo- 
ples thus  defer  not  only  their  artificial  pa- 
rade of  party  politics  but  their  real  social  and 
moral  complaints  and  demands'?      What  is 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAX       85 

it  that  has  united  all  of  us  against  the  Prus- 
sian, as  against  a  mad  dog4?  It  is  the  pres- 
ence of  a  certain  spirit,  as  unmistakable  as  a 
pungent  smell,  which  we  feel  is  capable  of 
withering  all  the  good  things  in  this  world. 
The  burglary  of  Belgium,  the  bribe  to  betray 
France,  these  are  not  excuses;  they  are  facts. 
But  they  are  only  the  facts  by  which  we 
came  to  know  of  the  presence  of  the  spirit. 
They  do  not  suffice  to  define  the  whole  spirit 
itself.  A  good  rough  summary  is  to  say  that 
it  is  the  spirit  of  barbarism;  but  indeed  it  is 
something  worse.  It  is  the  spirit  of  second- 
rate  civilisation;  and  the  distinction  involves 
the  most  important  differences.  Granted 
that  it  could  exist,  pure  barbarism  could  not 
last  long;  as  pure  babyhood  cannot  last  long. 
Of  his  own  nature  the  baby  is  interested  in 
the  ticking  of  a  watch;  and  the  time  will 
come  when  you  will  have  to  tell  him,  if  you 
only  tell  him  the  wrong  time.     And  that  is 


86       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

exactly    what    the    second-rate    civilisation 
does. 

But  the  vital  point  is  here.  The  abstract 
barbarian  would  copy.  The  cockney  and 
incomplete  civilisation  always  sets  itself  up 
to  be  copied.  And  in  the  case  here  consid- 
ered, the  German  thinks  that  it  is  not  only 
his  business  to  spread  education,  but  to  spread 
compulsory  education.  "Science  combined 
with  organisation,"  says  Professor  Ostwald 
of  Berlin  University,  "makes  us  terrible  to 
our  opponents  and  ensures  a  German  future 
for  Europe."  That  is,  as  shortly  as  it  can 
be  put,  what  we  are  fighting  about.  We  are 
fighting  to  prevent  a  German  future  for 
Europe.  We  think  it  would  be  narrower, 
nastier,  less  sane,  less  capable  of  liberty  and 
of  laughter,  than  any  of  the  worst  parts  of 
the  European  past.  And  when  I  cast  about 
for  a  form  in  which  to  explain  shortly  why 
we  think  so,  I  thought  of  you.     For  this  is 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       87 

a  matter  so  large  that  I  know  not  how  to  ex- 
press it  except  in  terms  of  artists  like  you,  in 
the  service  of  beauty  and  the  faith  in  free- 
dom. Prussia,  at  least  cannot  help  me; 
Lord  Palmerston,  I  believe,  called  it  a  coun- 
try of  damned  professors.  Lord  Palmers- 
ton,  I  fear,  used  the  word  "damned"  more  or 
less  flippantly.     I  use  it  reverently. 

Rome,  at  her  very  weakest,  has  always 
been  a  river  that  wanders  and  widens  and 
that  waters  many  fields.  Berlin,  at  its 
strongest,  will  never  be  anything  but  a 
whirlpool,  which  seeks  its  own  centre,  and  is 
sucked  down.  It  would  only  narrow  all  the 
rest  of  Europe,  as  it  has  already  narrowed 
all  the  rest  of  Germany.  There  is  a  spirit 
of  diseased  egoism,  which  at  last  makes  all 
things  spin  upon  one  pin-point  in  the  brain. 
It  is  a  spirit  expressed  more  often  in  the 
slangs  than  in  the  tongues  of  men.  The 
English  call  it  a  fad.     I  do  not  know  what 


88       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

the   Italians   call   it;   the   Prussians   call   it 
philosophy. 

Here  is  the  sort  of  instance  that  made  me 
think  of  you.  What  would  you  feel  first, 
let  us  say,  if  I  mentioned  Michael  Angelo1? 
For  the  first  moment,  perhaps,  boredom: 
such  as  I  feel  when  Americans  ask  me  about 
Stratford-on-Avon.  But,  supposing  that  just 
fear  quieted,  you  would  feel  what  I  and 
every  one  else  can  feel.  It  might  be  the 
sense  of  the  majestic  hands  of  Man  upon  the 
locks  of  the  last  doors  of  life;  large  and  ter- 
rible hands,  like  those  of  that  youth  who 
poises  the  stone  above  Florence,  and  looks 
out  upon  the  circle  of  the  hills.  It  might  be 
that  huge  heave  of  flank  and  chest  and  throat 
in  "The  Slave,"  which  is  like  an  earthquake 
lifting  a  whole  landscape;  it  might  be  that 
tremendous  Madonna,  whose  charity  is  more 
strong  than  death.  Anyhow,  your  thoughts 
would  be  something  worthy  of  the  man's 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       89 

terrible  paganism  and  his  more  terrible  Chris- 
tianity. Who  but  God  could  have  graven 
Michael  Angelo;  who  came  so  near  to  grav- 
ing the  Mother  of  God? 

German  culture  deals  with  the  matter  as 
follows: — "Michelangelo  Buonarotti  (1475- 
1564). — (=Bemhard)  ancestor  of  the  fam- 
ily, lived  in  Florence  about  1210.  He  had 
two  sons,  Berlinghieri  and  Buonarrota.  By 
this  name  recurring  frequently  in  later  gen- 
erations, the  family  came  to  be  called.  It 
is  a  German  name,  compounded  of  Bona 
(=Bohn)  and  Hrodo,  Roto  (=Rohde, 
Rothe)  Bona  and  Rotto  are  cited  as  Lom- 
bard names.  Buonarotti  is  perhaps  the  old 
Lombard  Beonrad,  corresponding  to  the 
word  Bonroth.  Corresponding  names  are 
Mackrodt,  Osterroth,  Leonard."  And  so  on, 
and  so  on,  and  so  on.  "In  his  face  he  has  al- 
ways been  well-coloured  .  .  .  the  eyes  might 
be  called  small   rather  than  large,   of   the 


9o       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

colour  of  horn,  but  variable  with  'flecks'  of 
yellow  and  blue.  Hair  and  beard  are  black. 
These  particulars  are  confirmed  by  the  por- 
traits. First  and  foremost  take  the  portrait 
of  Bugiardini  in  Museo  Buonarotti.  Here 
comes  to  view  the  'flecked'  appearance  of  the 
iris,  especially  in  the  right  eye.  The  left 
may  be  described  as  almost  wholly  blue." 
And  so  on,  and  so  on,  and  so  on.  "In  the 
Museo  Civico  at  Pavia,  is  a  fresco  likeness  by 
an  unknown  hand,  in  which  this  fresh  red  is 
distinctly  recognisable  on  the  face.  Taking 
all  these  bodily  characteristics  into  considera- 
tion, it  must  be  said  from  an  anthropological 
point  of  view  that  though  originally  of  Ger- 
man family  he  was  a  hybrid  between  the 
North  and  West  brunette  race." 

Would  you  take  the  trouble  to  prove  that 
Michael  Angelo  was  an  Italian  that  this  man 
takes  to  prove  that  he  was  a  German'?  Of 
course  not.     The  only  impression  this  man 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       91 

(who  is  a  recognised  Prussian  historian)  pro- 
duces on  your  mind  or  mine  is  that  he  does 
not  care  about  Michael  Angelo.  For  you, 
being  an  Italian,  are  therefore  something 
more  than  an  Italian;  and  I  being  an  English- 
man, something  more  than  an  Englishman. 
But  this  poor  fellow  really  cannot  be  any- 
thing more  than  a  Prussian.  He  digs  and 
digs  to  find  dead  Prussians,  in  the  catacombs 
of  Rome  or  under  the  ruins  of  Troy.  If  he 
can  find  one  blue  eye  lying  about  somewhere, 
he  is  satisfied.  He  has  no  philosophy.  He 
has  a  hobby,  which  is  collecting  Germans. 
It  would  probably  be  vain  for  you  and  me  to 
point  out  that  we  could  prove  anything  by 
the  sort  of  ingenuity  which  finds  the  German 
"rothe"  in  Buonarotti.  We  could  have 
great  fun  depriving  Germany  of  all  her 
geniuses  in  that  style.  We  could  say  that 
Moltke  must  have  been  an  Italian,  from  the 
old  Latin  root  mol — indicating  the  sweetness 


92       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

of  that  general's  disposition.  We  might  say- 
Bismarck  was  a  Frenchman,  since  his  name 
begins  with  the  popular  theatrical  cry  of 
"Bis !"  We  might  say  Goethe  was  an  Eng- 
lishman, because  his  name  begins  with  the 
popular  sporting  cry  "Go!"  But  the  ulti- 
mate difference  between  us  and  the  Prussian 
professor  is  simply  that  we  are  not  mad. 

The  father  of  Frederick  the  Great,  the 
founder  of  the  more  modern  Hohenzollerns, 
was  mad.  His  madness  consisted  of  steal- 
ing giants;  like  an  unscrupulous  travelling 
showman.  Any  man  much  over  six  foot 
high,  whether  he  were  called  the  Russian 
Giant  or  the  Irish  Giant  or  the  Chinese 
Giant  or  the  Hottentot  Giant,  was  in  danger 
of  being  kidnapped  and  imprisoned  in  a 
Prussian  uniform.  It  is  the  same  mean  sort 
of  madness  that  is  working  in  Prussian  pro- 
fessors such  as  the  one  I  have  quoted.  They 
can  get  no  further  than  the  notion  of  steal- 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN        93 

ing  giants.  I  will  not  bore  you  now  with  all 
the  other  giants  they  have  tried  to  steal;  it  is 
enough  to  say  that  St.  Paul,  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  and  Shakespeare  himself  are  among 
the  monstrosities  exhibited  at  Frederick- 
William  fair — on  grounds  as  good  as  those 
quoted  above.  But  I  have  put  this  particu- 
lar case  before  you,  as  an  artist  rather  than 
an  Italian,  to  show  what  I  mean  when  I  ob- 
ject to  a  "German  future  for  Europe."  I 
object  to  something  which  believes  very 
much  in  itself,  and  in  which  I  do  not  in  the 
least  believe.  I  object  to  something  which 
is  conceited  and  small-minded;  but  which 
also  has  that  kind  of  pertinacity  which  al- 
ways belongs  to  lunatics.  It  wants  to  be 
able  to  congratulate  itself  on  Michael  An- 
gelo;  never  to  congratulate  the  world.  It 
is  the  spirit  that  can  be  seen  in  those  who 
go  bald  trying  to  trace  a  genealogy;  or  go 
bankrupt  trying  to  make  out  a  claim  to  some 


94       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

remote  estate.  The  Prussian  has  the  incon- 
sistency of  the  parvenu;  he  will  labour  to 
prove  that  he  is  related  to  some  gentleman 
of  the  Renaissance,  even  while  he  boasts  of 
being  able  to  "buy  him  up."  If  the  Italians 
were  really  great,  why — they  were  really 
Germans;  and  if  they  weren't  really  Ger- 
mans, well  then,  they  weren't  really  great. 
It  is  an  occupation  for  an  old  maid. 

Three  or  four  hundred  years  ago,  in  the 
sad  silence  that  had  followed  the  compara- 
tive failure  of  the  noble  effort  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages,  there  came  upon  all  Europe  a  storm 
out  of  the  south.  Its  tumult  is  of  many 
tongues;  one  can  hear  in  it  the  laughter  of 
Rabelais,  or,  for  that  matter,  the  lyrics  of 
Shakespeare ;  but  the  dark  heart  of  the  storm 
was  indeed  more  austral  and  volcanic;  a 
noise  of  thunderous  wings  and  the  name  of 
Michael  the  Archangel.  And  when  it  had 
shocked  and  purified  the  world  and  passed, 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       95 

a  Prussian  professor  found  a  feather  fallen 
to  earth;  and  proved  (in  several  volumes) 
that  it  could  only  have  come  from  a  Prus- 
sian Eagle.     He  had  seen  one — in  a  cage. 

Yours , 

G.  K.  Chesterton. 


My  Dear , 

The  facts  before  all  Europeans  to-day  are 
so  fundamental  that  I  still  find  it  easier  to 
talk  about  them  to  you  as  to  an  old  friend, 
rather  than  put  it  in  the  shape  of  a  pamphlet. 
In  my  last  letter  I  pointed  out  two  facts 
which  are  pivots.  The  first  is  that,  to  any 
really  cultured  person,  Prussia  is  second-rate. 
The  second  is  that  to  almost  any  Prussian, 
Prussia  is  really  first-rate;  and  is  prepared, 
quite  literally,  to  police  the  rest  of  the  world. 

For  the  first  matter,  the  comparative  in- 
feriority of  German  culture  cannot  be 
doubted  by  people  like  you.     One  of  the 


96       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

German  papers  pathetically  said  that,  though 
the  mangling  of  Malines  and  Rheims  was 
very  sad,  it  was  a  comfort  to  think  that  yet 
nobler  works  of  art  would  spring  up  wher- 
ever the  German  culture  had  passed  in  tri- 
umph. From  the  point  of  view  of  humour, 
it  is  really  rather  sad  that  they  never  will. 
The  German  Emperor's  idea  of  a  Gothic 
cathedral  is  as  provocative  to  the  fancy  as 
Mrs.  Todgers'  idea  of  a  wooden  leg.  But  I 
think  it  perfectly  probable  that  they  really 
intended  to  set  up  such  beautiful  buildings 
as  they  could.  Having  been  blasphemous 
enough  to  ruin  such  things,  they  might  well 
be  blasphemous  enough  to  replace  them. 
Even  if  the  Prussian  attempt  on  Paris  had 
not  wholly  collapsed  as  it  has,  I  doubt 
whether  the  Prussians  would  have  destroyed 
everything.  I  doubt  whether  they  would 
even  have  destroyed  the  Venus  de  Milo. 
More  probably  they  would  have  put  a  pair 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN        97 

of  arms  on  it,  designed  by  some  rising  Ger- 
man artist — the  Emperor  or  somebody. 
And  the  two  arms  thus  added  would  look  at 
once  like  the  arms  of  a  woman  at  a  wash-tub. 
The  destroyers  of  the  tower  of  Rheims  are 
quite  capable  of  destroying  the  Tower  of 
Giotto.  But  they  are  equally  capable  of  the 
greater  crime  of  completing  it.  And  if  they 
put  on  a  spire,  what  a  spire  it  would  be! 
What  an  extinguisher  for  that  clear  and  al- 
most transparent  Christian  candle!  Have 
you  read  some  of  the  German  explanations 
of  Hamlet*?  Did  I  tell  you  that  Leonardo's 
hair  must  have  been  German  hair,  because 
so  many  of  his  contemporaries  said  it  was 
beautiful4?  This  is  what  I  call  being  sec- 
ond-rate. All  the  German  excitement  about 
the  colonies  of  England  is  only  a  half  under- 
standing of  what  was  once  heroic  and  is  now 
largely  caddish.  The  German  Emperor's 
naval  vision  is  a  bad  copy  of  Nelson,  as  cer- 


98       THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

tainly  as  Frederick  the  Great's  verses  were  a 
bad  copy  of  Voltaire. 

But  the  second  point  was  even  more  im- 
portant; that  weak  as  the  thing  is  mentally 
it  is  strong  materially;  and  will  impose  itself 
materially  if  we  permit  it.  The  Prussians 
have  failed  in  everything  else ;  but  they  have 
not  failed  in  getting  their  subject  thousands 
to  do  as  they  are  told.  They  cannot  put  up 
black  and  white  towers  in  Florence;  but  they 
can  really  put  up  black  and  white  posts  in 
Alsace.  They  have  failed  in  diplomacy. 
I  suppose  it  might  be  called  a  failure  in 
diplomacy  to  come  into  the  fight  with  two 
enemies  extra  and  one  ally  the  less.  If  the 
Germans,  instead  of  sending  spies  to  study 
the  Belgian  soil,  had  sent  spies  to  consider 
the  Belgian  soul,  they  would  have  been 
saved  hard  work  for  a  week  or  two.  They 
have  failed  in  controversy.  I  suppose  it 
might  be  called  a  failure  in  controversy  to 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN        99 

say  that  England  may  be  keeping  her  word 
for  some  wicked  purpose;  while  Germany 
may  be  breaking  her  word  for  some  noble 
purpose.  And  that  is  practically  all  that  the 
Germans  can  manage  to  say.  They  say  that 
we  are  an  insatiable,  unscrupulous,  piratical 
power;  and  this  wild  spirit  whirled  us  into 
the  mad  course  of  respecting  a  treaty  we  had 
signed.  They  can  find  in  us  no  treason  ex- 
cept that  we  keep  our  treaties :  failing  to  do 
this  I  call  failing  in  controversy.  They 
have  failed  in  popular  persuasion.  They 
have  had  a  very  good  opportunity.  The 
British  Empire  does  contain  many  people 
who  have  been  badly  treated  in  various  ways : 
the  Irish,  the  Boers;  nay,  the  Americans 
themselves,  whose  national  existence  began 
with  being  badly  treated.  With  these  the 
Prussians  have  done  comparatively  little; 
and  with  Europeans  of  your  sort  nothing. 
They  have  never  once   really  sympathised 


ioo     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

with  the  feeling  of  a  Switzer  for  Switzer- 
land; the  feeling  of  a  Norwegian  for  Nor- 
way; the  feeling  of  a  Tuscan  for  Tuscany. 
Even  when  nations  are  neutral,  Prussia  can 
hardly  bear  them  to  be  patriotic.  Even 
when  they  are  courting  every  one  else  they 
can  praise  no  one  but  themselves.  They  fail 
in  diplomacy,  they  fail  in  debate,  they  fail 
even  in  demagogy.  They  have  stupid  plots, 
stupid  explanations,  and  even  stupid  apolo- 
gies. But  there  is  one  thing  they  really  do 
not  fail  in.  They  do  not  fail  in  finding  peo- 
ple stupid  enough  to  carry  them  out. 

Now,  it  is  this  question  I  would  ask  you 
to  consider;  you,  as  a  good  middle  type  of 
the  Latins,  a  Liberal  but  a  Catholic,  an  art- 
ist but  a  soldier.  The  danger  to  the  whole 
civilisation  of  which  Rome  was  the  foun- 
tain lies  in  this.  That  the  more  this  strange 
Pruss  people  fail  in  all  the  other  things,  the 
more  they  will  fall  back  on  this  mere  fact  of 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      101 

a  brutal  obedience.  They  will  give  orders; 
they  have  nothing  else  to  give.  I  say  that 
this  is  the  question  for  you ;  I  do  not  say,  I  do 
not  dream  of  saying,  that  the  answer  is  for 
me.  It  is  for  you  to  weigh  the  chance  that 
their  very  failures  in  the  arts  of  peace  will 
drive  them  back  upon  the  arts  of  war.  They 
could  not,  and  they  did  not,  dupe  your 
people  in  diplomacy.  They  did  the  most 
undiplomatic  thing  that  can  be  done;  they 
concealed  a  breach  of  partnership  without 
even  concealing  the  concealment.  They  in- 
stigated the  intrigue  in  Austria  in  such  a  way 
that  Italy  could  honestly  claim  all  the  free- 
dom of  past  ignorance,  combined  with  all 
the  disillusionment  of  present  knowledge. 
They  so  ran  the  Triple  Alliance  that  they  had 
to  admit  your  grievance,  at  the  very  moment 
when  they  claimed  your  aid.  The  English 
are  stupider  and  less  sensitive  than  you  are; 
but   even   the   English   found   the   German 


102     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Chancellor's  diplomacy  not  insinuating  but 
simply  insulting;  I  swear  I  would  be  a  bet- 
ter diplomatist  myself.  In  the  same  way, 
there  is  no  danger  of  people  like  you  being 
corrupted  in  controversy.  There  is  no  fear 
that  the  professors  who  pullulate  all  over 
the  Baltic  Plain  will  overcome  the  Latins  in 
logic.  Some  of  them  even  claim  to  be  super- 
logical;  and  say  they  are  too  big  for  syl- 
logisms; generally  having  found  even  one 
syllogism  too  big  for  them.  If  they  com- 
plain either  of  your  abstention  from  their 
cause  or  your  adhesion  to  any  other,  you 
have  an  unanswerable  answer.  You  will 
say,  as  you  did  say,  that  you  did  not  break 
the  Triple  Alliance,  even  for  the  sake  of 
peace.  It  was  they  who  broke  it  for  the 
sake  of  war.  You,  obviously,  had  as  much 
right  to  be  consulted  about  Servia  as  Aus- 
tria had;  and  on  the  mere  chess-board  of 
argument  it  is  mate  in  one  move.     Nor  are 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       103 

they  in  the  least  fitted  to  make  an  appeal 
to  the  popular  sentiment  of  your  people. 
The  English,  I  dare  say,  and  the  French, 
have  talked  an  amazing  amount  of  nonsense 
about  you;  but  they  understand  a  little  bet- 
ter. They  do  not  write  exactly  like  this, 
which  is  from  the  most  public  and  accepted 
Prussian  political  philosopher  (Chamber- 
lain). "Who  can  live  in  Italy  to-day  and 
mix  with  its  amiable  and  highly  gifted  in- 
habitants without  feeling  with  pain  that  here 
a  great  nation  is  lost,  irredeemably  lost,  be- 
cause it  lacks  the  inner  driving  power,"  etc., 
which  has  brought  Von  Kluck  so  trium- 
phantly through  Paris.  Even  a  half-educated 
Englishman,  who  has  heard  of  no  Italian 
poet  except  Dante,  knows  that  he  was  some- 
thing more  than  amiable.  Even  a  positively 
illiterate  Frenchman,  who  has  heard  of  no 
Italian  warrior  except  Napoleon,  knows  that 
it  was  not  in  "inner  driving  force"  that  the 


104     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

artilleryman  in  question  was  deficient. 
"Who  can  live  in  Italy  to-day?"  Evi- 
dently the  Prussian  philosopher  can't.  His 
impressions  are  taken  from  Italian  operas; 
not  from  Italian  streets;  certainly  not  from 
Italian  fields.  As  a  matter  of  fact  such  im- 
ages of  Italy  as  burn  in  the  memories  of  most 
open-minded  Northerners  who  have  been 
there,  are  of  exactly  the  other  kind.  I  for 
one  should  be  inclined  to  say,  "Who  can  live 
in  Italy  to-day  without  feeling  that  a  woman 
feeding  children,  or  a  man  chopping  wood, 
may  almost  touch  him  with  fear  with  the 
fulness  of  their  humanity :  so  that  he  can  al- 
most smell  blood,  as  one  smells  burning?" 
Italians  often  look  lazy;  that  is,  they  look 
as  if  they  would  not  move;  but  not  as  if 
they  could  not  move,  as  many  Germans  do. 
But  even  though  this  formula  fitted  the  Ital- 
ians, it  seems  scarcely  calculated  to  please 
them.     For   the   Prussians,   then,   with   the 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      105 

failure  of  their  diplomacy,  the  failure  of 
their  philosophy,  we  may  also  place  the  fail- 
ure of  their  appeals  to  a  foreign  people. 
The  Prussian  writer  may  continue  his  at- 
tempts to  soothe  and  charm  you  by  telling 
you  that  you  are  irredeemably  lost,  and  that 
all  great  Italians  must  have  been  something 
else.  But  the  method  seems  to  me  ill 
adapted  to  popular  propaganda;  and  I  can- 
not but  say  that  on  this  third  point  of  per- 
suasion, the  German  attempt  is  not  striking. 
Now  all  this  is  important  for  this  reason. 
If  you  consider  it  carefully  you  will  see  why 
Europe  must,  at  whatever  cost,  break  Ger- 
many in  battle:  and  put  an  end  to  her  mili- 
tary and  material  power  to  do  things.  If 
we  all  have  to  fight  for  it,  if  we  all  have  to 
die  for  it,  it  must  be  done.  If  we  find  allies 
in  the  dwarfs  of  Greenland  or  the  giants  of 
Patagonia,  it  must  be  done.  And  the  rea- 
son is  that  unless  it  is  literally  and  materially 


io6     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

done,  other  things  will  be  literally  and  ma- 
terially done;  and  horrify  the  heavens. 
They  will  be  silly  things;  they  will  be  be- 
nighted and  limited  and  laughable  things; 
but  they  will  be  accomplished  things. 
Nothing  could  be  more  ridiculous,  if  that 
is  all,  than  the  moral  position  of  the  Prus- 
sian in  Poland;  where  a  magnificent  officer, 
making  a  vast  parade  of  "ruling,"  tries  to 
cheat  poor  peasants  out  of  their  fields  (and 
gets  cheated)  and  then  takes  refuge  in  beat- 
ing little  boys  for  saying  their  prayers  in 
their  native  tongue.  All  who  remember 
anything  of  dignity,  of  irony,  in  short  of 
Rome  and  reason,  can  see  why  an  officer 
need  not,  should  not,  had  better  not,  and 
generally  does  not,  beat  little  boys.  But 
an  officer  can  beat  little  boys:  and  a  Prus- 
sian officer  will  go  on  doing  it  until  you  take 
away  the  stick.  Nothing  could  be  more 
comic,  if  that  is  all,  than  the  position  of 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      107 

Prussians  in  Alsace:  which  they  declare  to 
be  purely  German  and  admit  to  be  furiously 
French;  so  that  they  have  to  terrorise 
it  by  sabring  anybody,  including  cripples. 
Again,  any  of  us  can  see  why  an  officer 
need  not,  should  not,  had  better  not,  and 
generally  does  not,  sabre  a  cripple.  But  an 
officer  can  sabre  a  cripple;  and  a  Prussian 
officer  will  go  on  doing  it  until  you  take 
away  the  sabre.  It  is  this  insane  and  rigid 
realism  that  makes  their  case  peculiar:  like 
that  of  a  Chinaman  copying  something,  or 
a  half-witted  servant  taking  a  message.  If 
they  had  the  power  to  put  black  and  white 
posts  round  the  grave  of  Virgil,  or  dig  up 
Dante  to  see  if  he  had  yellow  hair,  the  mere 
doing  of  it  which  for  some  of  us  would  be 
the  most  unlikely,  would  for  them  be  the 
least  unlikely  thing.  They  do  not  hear  the 
laughter  of  the  ages.  If  they  had  the  power 
to  treat  the  English  or  Italian  Premier  quite 


108     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

literally  as  a  traitor,  and  shoot  him  against 
a  wall,  they  are  quite  capable  of  turning 
such  hysterical  rhetoric  into  reality:  and 
scattering  his  brains  before  they  had  col- 
lected their  own.  They  do  not  feel  atmos- 
pheres. They  are  all  a  little  deaf;  as  they 
are  all  a  little  short-sighted.  They  are  an- 
noyed when  their  enemies,  after  such  ex- 
periences as  those  of  Belgium,  accuse  them 
of  breaking  their  promises.  And  in  one 
sense  they  are  right;  for  there  are  some  sorts 
of  promises  they  probably  would  keep.  If 
they  have  promised  to  respect  a  free  country, 
or  an  old  friend,  to  observe  a  sworn  partner- 
ship, or  to  spare  a  harmless  population,  they 
will  find  such  restrictions  chilling  and  irk- 
some. They  will  ask  some  professor  on 
what  principle  they  are  discarding  it.  But 
if  they  have  promised  to  shoot  the  cross  off 
a  church  spire,  or  empty  the  inkpot  into 
somebody's  beer,  or  bring  home  somebody's 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      109 

ears  in  their  pocket  for  the  pleasure  of 
their  families,  I  think  in  these  cases  they 
would  feel  a  sort  of  a  shadow  of  what 
civilised  men  feel  in  the  fulfilment  of  a 
promise,  as  distinct  from  the  making  of  it. 
And,  in  consideration  of  such  cases,  I  can- 
not go  the  whole  length  of  those  severe 
critics  who  say  that  a  Prussian  will  never 
keep  his  promise. 

Unfortunately,  it  is  precisely  this  sort  of 
actuality  and  fulfilment  that  makes  it  urgent 
that  Europe  should  put  forth  her  whole 
energy  to  drag  down  these  antique  demoniacs ; 
these  idiots  filled  with  force  as  by  fiends. 
They  will  do  things,  as  a  maniac  will,  until 
he  cannot  do  them.  To  me  it  seemed  that 
some  things  could  not  be  said  and  done.  I 
thought  a  man  would  have  been  ashamed  to 
bribe  a  new  enemy  like  England  to  betray 
an  old  enemy  like  France.  I  thought  a  man 
would   have   been    ashamed   to   punish   the 


no     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

pure  self-defence  of  folk  so  offenceless  as 
the  Belgians.  These  hopes  must  go  from 
us,  my  friend.  There  is  only  one  thing 
of  which  the  Prussian  would  be  ashamed; 
and  of  that,  we  have  sworn  to  God,  he  shall 
taste  before  the  end. 


My  Dear 

The  Prussianised  German,  of  whatever 
blend  of  races  he  may  be,  has  one  quality 
which  may  perhaps  be  racially  simple;  but 
which  is,  at  any  rate,  very  plain.  Chamber- 
lain, the  German  philosopher  or  historian 
(I  know  not  which  to  call  him  or  how  to  call 
him  either)  remarks  somewhere  that  pure- 
bred races  possess  fidelity;  he  instances  the 
negro  and  the  dog — and,  I  suppose,  the  Ger- 
man. Anyhow,  it  is  true  that  there  is  a 
recognisable  and  real  thing  which  might  be 
called  fidelity  (or  perhaps  monotony)  which 
exists  in  Germans  in  about  the  same  style 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN       1 1 1 

as  in  dogs  and  niggers.  The  North  Teuton 
really  has  in  this  respect  the  simplicities  of 
the  savage  and  the  lower  animals;  that  he 
has  no  reactions.  He  does  not  laugh  at  him- 
self.- He  does  not  want  to  kick  himself. 
He  does  not,  like  most  of  us,  repent — or 
occasionally  even  repent  of  repenting.  He 
does  not  read  his  own  works  and  find  them 
much  worse  or  much  better  than  he  had  ex- 
pected. He  does  not  feel  a  faint  irrational 
sense  of  debauch,  after  even  divine  pleas- 
ures of  this  life.  Watch  him  at  a  German 
restaurant,  and  you  will  satisfy  yourself  that 
he  does  not.  In  short,  both  in  the  most 
scientific  and  in  the  most  casual  sense  of  the 
word,  he  does  not  know  what  it  is  to  have 
a  temper.  He  does  not  bend  and  fly  back 
like  steel;  he  sticks  out,  like  wood.  In  this 
he  differs  from  any  nation  I  have  known, 
from  your  nation  and  mine,  from  the  French, 
the  Spanish,  the  Scotch,  the  Welsh  and  the 


112     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

Irish.  Bad  luck  never  braces  him  as  it  does 
us.  Good  luck  never  frightens  him  as  it 
does  us.  It  can  be  seen  in  what  the  French 
call  Chauvinism  and  we  call  Jingoism.  For 
us  it  is  fireworks;  for  him  it  is  daylight.  On 
Mafeking  Night,  celebrating  a  small  but 
picturesque  success  against  the  Boers,  nearly 
everybody  in  London  came  out  waving  little 
flags.  Nearly  everybody  in  London  is  now 
heartily  ashamed  of  it.  But  it  would  never 
occur  to  the  Prussians  not  to  ride  their  high 
horses  with  the  freshest  insolence  for  the  far- 
off  victory  of  Sedan;  though  on  that  very 
anniversary  the  star  of  their  fate  had  turned 
scornful  in  the  sky,  and  Von  Kluck  was  in 
retreat  from  Paris.  Above  all,  the  Prus- 
sian does  not  feel  annoyed,  as  I  do,  when 
foreigners  praise  his  country  for  all  the 
wrong  reasons.  The  Prussian  will  allow 
you  to  praise  him  for  any  reasons,  for  any 
length  of  time,  for  any  eternity  of  folly; 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      113 

he  is  there  to  be  praised.  Probably  he  is 
proud  of  this;  probably  he  thinks  he  has  a 
good  digestion,  because  the  poison  of  praise 
does  not  make  him  sick.  He  thinks  the  ab- 
sence of  such  doubt,  or  self-knowledge, 
makes  for  composure,  grandeur,  a  colossal 
calm,  a  superior  race — in  short,  the  whole 
claim'  of  the  Teutons  to  be  the  highest  spirit- 
ual product  of  Nature  and  Evolution.  But 
as  I  have  noticed  a  calm  unity  even  more 
complete,  not  only  in  dogs  and  negroes,  but 
in  slugs,  slow-worms,  mangoldwurzels,  moss, 
mud  and  bits  of  stone,  I  am  a  sceptic  about 
this  test  for  the  marshalling  in  rank  of  all 
the  children  of  God.  Now  I  point  this  out 
to  you  here  for  a  very  practical  reason. 
The  Prussian  will  never  understand  revolu- 
tions— which  are  generally  reactions.  He 
regards  them,  not  only  with  dislike,  but  with 
a  mysterious  kind  of  pity.  Throughout  his 
confused    popular    histories,    there    runs    a 


114     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

strange  suggestion  that  civic  populations 
have  failed  hitherto,  and  failed  because  they 
were  always  fighting.  The  population  of 
Berlin  does  not  fight,  or  can't;  and  therefore 
Berlin  will  succeed  where  Greece  and  Rome 
have  failed.  Hitherto  it  is  plain  enough 
that  Berlin  has  succeeded  in  nothing  except 
in  bad  copies  of  Greece  and  Rome ;  and  Prus- 
sians would  be  wiser  to  discuss  the  details 
of  the  Greek  and  Roman  past,  which  we  can 
follow,  rather  than  the  details  of  their  own 
future,  about  which  we  are  naturally  not  so 
well  infomied.  Well,  every  dome  they 
build,  every  pillar  they  put  upright,  every 
pedestal  for  epitaph  or  panel  for  decora- 
tion, every  type  of  church,  Catholic  or  Prot- 
estant, every  kind  of  street,  large  or  small, 
they  have  copied  from  the  old  Pagan  or 
Catholic  cities;  and  those  cities,  when  they 
made  those  things,  were  boiling  with  revolu- 
tions.    I  remember  a  German  professor  say- 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      115 

ing  to  me,  "I  should  have  no  scruple  about 
extinguishing  such  republics  as  Brazil,  Ven- 
ezuela, Bolivia,  Nicaragua;  they  are  per- 
petually rioting  for  one  thing  or  another." 
I  said  I  supposed  he  would  have  had  no 
scruple  in  extinguishing  Athens,  Rome,  Flor- 
ence and  Paris;  for  they  were  always  rioting 
for  one  thing  or  another.  His  reply  indi- 
cated, I  thought,  that  he  felt  about  Ccesar 
or  Rienzi  very  much  as  the  Scotch  Presby- 
terian Minister  felt  about  Christ,  when  he 
was  reminded  of  the  corn-plucking  on  the 
Sabbath,  and  said,  "Weel,  I  dinna  think  the 
better  of  him."  In  other  words  he  was  quite 
positive,  like  all  his  countrymen,  that  he 
could  impose  a  sort  of  Pax  Germanica,  which 
would  satisfy  all  the  needs  of  order  and  of 
freedom  forever;  leaving  no  need  for  revo- 
lutions or  reactions.  I  am  myself  of  a  dif- 
ferent opinion.  When  I  was  a  child,  when 
the  toy-trade  of  Germany  had  begun  to  flood 


n6     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

this  country,  there  was  a  priggish  British 
couplet,  engraven  on  the  minds  of  govern- 
esses, which  ran — 

What  the  German  children  delight  to  make 
The  English  children  delight  to  break. 

I  can  answer  for  the  delight  of  the  Eng- 
lish children;  a  just  and  godlike  delight.  I 
am  not  so  sure  about  the  delight  of  the  Ger- 
man children,  when  they  were  caught  in  the 
infernal  wheels  of  the  modern  civilisation  of 
factories.  But,  for  the  present,  I  am  only 
concerned  to  say  that  I  do  not  accept  this 
line  of  historical  division.  I  do  not  think 
history  supports  the  view  that  those  who 
could  break  things  could  not  make  them. 

This  is  the  least  intrusive  approach  by 
which  I  can  touch  on  a  topic  that  must  of 
necessity  be  a  delicate  one;  yet  which  may 
well  be  a  difficulty  among  Latins  like  your- 
self.    Against    this    preposterous    Prussian 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      117 

upstart  we  have  not  only  to  protect  our 
unity;  we  have  even  to  protect  our  quarrels. 
And  the  deepest  of  the  reactions  or  revolts 
of  which  I  have  spoken  is  the  quarrel  which 
(very  tragically  as  I  think)  has  for  some 
hundred  years  cloven  the  Christian  from  the 
Liberal  ideal.  It  would  ill  become  me,  in 
whose  country  there  is  neither  such  clear  doc- 
trine nor  such  combative  democracy,  to  sup- 
pose it  can  be  easy  for  any  of  you  to  close 
up  such  sacred  wounds.  There  must  still 
be  Catholics  who  feel  they  can  never  forgive 
a  Jacobin.  There  must  still  be  old  Repub- 
licans who  feel  that  they  could  never  endure 
a  priest.  And  yet  there  is  something,  the 
mere  sight  of  which  should  lock  them  both 
in  an  instant  alliance.  They  have  only  to 
look  northward  and  hold  the  third  thing, 
which  thinks  itself  superior  to  either:  the 
enormous  turnip-face  of  ce  type  la,  as  the 
French  say,  who  conceives  that  he  can  make 


1 18     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

them  both  like  himself  and  yet  remain  supe- 
rior to  both. 

I  implore  you  to  keep  out  of  the  hands 
of  this  Fool  the  quarrel  of  the  great  saints 
and  of  the  great  blasphemers.  He  will  do 
to  religion  what  he  will  do  to  art;  mix  up 
all  the  colours  on  your  palette  into  the  col- 
our of  mud :  and  then  say  that  only  the  puri- 
fied eyes  of  Teutons  can  see  that  it  is  pure 
white.  The  other  day  the  Director  of 
Museums  in  Berlin  was  said  to  be  setting 
about  the  creation  of  a  new  kind  of  Art: 
German  Art.  Philosophers  and  men  of 
science  were  at  the  same  time  directed  to 
meet  round  the  table  and  found  a  new 
Religion:  German  Religion.  How  can 
such  people  appreciate  art;  how  can  they  ap- 
preciate religion — nay,  how  can  they  ap- 
preciate irreligion?  How  does  one  invent 
a  message*?  How  does  one  create  a  Crea- 
tor*?    Is  it  not  the  plain  meaning  of  the 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDIAN      119 

Gospel  that  it  is  good  news?  And  is  it  not 
the  plain  meaning  of  good  news  that  it  must 
come  from  outside  oneself?  Otherwise  I 
could  make  myself  happy  this  moment,  by 
inventing  an  enormous  victory  in  Flanders. 
And  I  suppose  (now  I  come  to  think  of  it) 
that  the  Gennans  do. 

By  the  fulness  of  your  faith  and  even  the 
fulness  of  your  despair,  you  that  remember 
Rome,  have  earned  a  right  to  prevent  all  our 
quarrels  being  quenched  in  such  cold  water 
from  the  north.  But  it  is  not  too  much  to 
say  that  neither  religion  at  its  worst  nor 
republicanism  at  its  worst  ever  offered  the 
coarse  insult  to  all  mankind  that  is  offered 
by  this  new  and  nakedly  universal  mon- 
archy. 

There  has  always  been  something  common 
to  civilised  men,  whether  they  called  it  be- 
ing merely  a  citizen;  or  being  merely  a  sin- 
ner.    There    has    always    been    something 


120     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

which  your  ancestors  called  Verecundia; 
which  is  at  once  humility  and  dignity. 
Whatever  our  faults,  we  do  not  do  exactly 
as  the  Prussians  do.  We  do  not  bellow  day 
and  night  to  draw  attention  to  our  own  stern 
silence.  We  do  not  praise  ourselves  solely 
because  nobody  else  will  praise  us.  I,  for 
one,  say  at  the  end  of  these  letters,  as  I  said 
at  the  beginning;  that  in  these  international 
matters  I  have  often  differed  from  my  coun- 
trymen; I  have  often  differed  from  my- 
self. I  shall  not.  claim  the  completeness  of 
this  silly  creature  we  discuss.  I  shall  not 
answer  his  boasts  with  boasts;  but  with 
blows. 

My  front-door  is  beaten  in  and  broken 
down  suddenly.  I  see  nothing  outside,  ex- 
cept a  sort  of  smiling,  straw-haired  com- 
mercial traveller  with  a  notebook  open,  who 
says,  "Excuse  me,  I  am  a  faultless  being, 
I  have  persuaded  Poland ;  I  can  count  on  my 


LETTERS  TO  A  GARIBALDI  AN      121 

respectful  Allies  in  Alsace.  I  am  simply 
loved  in  Lorraine.  Quae  reggio  in  terris 
.  .  .  What  place  is  there  on  earth  where 
the  name  of  Prussia  is  not  the  signal  for 
hopeful  prayers  and  joyful  dances'?  I  am 
that  German  who  has  civilised  Belgium; 
and  delicately  trimmed  the  frontiers  of 
Denmark.  And  I  may  tell  you,  with  the 
fulness  of  conviction,  that  I  have  never 
failed,  and  shall  never  fail  in  anything. 
Permit  me,  therefore,  to  bless  your  house  by 
the  passage  of  my  beautiful  boots;  that  I 
may  burgle  the  house  next  door." 

And  then  something  European  that  is 
prouder  than  pride  will  rise  up  in  me;  and  I 
shall  answer: — 

"I  am  that  Englishman  who  has  tortured 
Ireland,  who  has  been  tortured  by  South 
Africa;  who  knows  all  his  mistakes,  who  is 
heavy  with  all  his  sins.  And  he  tells  you, 
Faultless  Being,  with  a  truth  as  deep  as  his 


122     THE  APPETITE  OF  TYRANNY 

own  guilt,  and  as  deathless  as  his  own  re- 
membrance, that  you  shall  not  pass  this 
way." 


